Open Access News

On the heels of the Harvard-led compact to support OA journals:

Stuart Shieber, Harvard’s new open-access fund, The Occasional Pamphlet, September 15, 2009.

Harvard’s participation in the open-access compact is being managed by the Office for Scholarly Communication, which has set up an open-access fund—the Harvard Open-Access Publishing Equity (HOPE) fund—consistent with the compact. Through HOPE, Harvard will reimburse eligible authors for open-access processing fees. Initially, members of the four Harvard faculties—Arts and Sciences, Education, Government, and Law—that have formally adopted open-access policies will be eligible to make use of the fund, with other faculties becoming eligible as they develop open-access policies. More information about Harvard’s fund can be found at the OSC web site.

From the HOPE fund site:

Faculty, researchers, staff, and students may request reimbursement for articles connected with their research activities at [the eligible] schools. ...

Eligible fees must be based on a publication's standard fee schedule that is independent of the author's institution.

The venue of publication must be an established open-access journal, that is, a journal that does not charge readers or their institutions for unfettered access to the peer-reviewed articles that it publishes. Journals with a hybrid open-access model or delayed open-access model are not eligible. To be eligible, a journal must meet these additional requirements:

• Be listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals,
• Be a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association or adhere to its Code of Conduct,
• Have publicly available a standard article fee schedule, and
• Have a policy to substantially waive fees in case of economic hardship.

We trust requesters to make appropriate decisions about the quality of the publication venue and the value of its services in relation to the fees it charges. ...

Articles for which alternative funding is available are not eligible for reimbursement. This includes articles funded by a gift or a grant from a granting agency, foundation, or other institution (including Harvard itself) that allows granted funds to be used for article processing fees ...

There is a nominal limit on the total reimbursement per article of $3,000, ...

[A]uthors may receive reimbursement for up to a total of $3,000 per academic year for all article processing fees. ...

[S]hould demand for funds exceed expectations, we may limit access to funds on a first-come-first-served basis. ...

You'll also need to make sure that you have deposited a copy of the article in the DASH repository before the reimbursement can be made. ...

See also this interview with Shieber from Harvard University Library Notes.

Comments. Kudos to Harvard for (again) putting its money where its mouth is.

• Tying eligibility for funding to the school's adoption of an OA policy, and to the individual's actual self-archiving of the funded article, are strong moves.
• The fund's requirements for journals are right-headed and reasonable.
• Including staff and students -- not just faculty -- in eligibility is laudable and forward-looking.

Labels: Hot