Open Access News

... Yale should join in the [OA] movement; it should push its faculty to make their articles available online by creating a free, open, University-supported repository of scholarly knowledge. ...

The issue is thus one of social justice and responsibility. It is an opportunity for Yale to fulfill its own mission. ...

Harvard University has already established an open-access policy. So has the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford School of Education, and the universities of Kansas and Oregon. Now Dartmouth University, Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley, have signed onto the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity, committing their schools to help underwrite the charges required to republish articles in open-access journals.

Yale is notably absent from this list. ...

Harvard’s policy came about through faculty leadership, and often movements for open access begin below the university administration. We must therefore help those around us to realize the benefits, the importance and the inevitability of open-access publishing. We must fight for the ideals behind our commitment to global education. We need to make our university aware that we believe in these values. ...

On Tues., Feb. 12, 2008, Harvard astonished the academic world when its Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously voted for a mandate that would require all faculty members to make their scholarly articles available for free online. Then in September 2009, a consortium of five elite universities, including Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley, declared that they would commit significant resources to open-access publishing. But one name is conspicuously missing from this list: Yale.

As universities and other institutions across the world celebrate Open Access Week (beginning Mon., Oct. 19), it is an important time to reconsider Yale’s mission regarding the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge in an emerging digital landscape. Despite recent efforts, Yale lags behind its peers in the adoption of open-access models that would make scholarly work available to the world. ...

Harvard and other universities have already led the way by joining the five-member Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity. It’s high time for us to join this effort with equal resolve. Yale has taken some steps toward disseminating information online, such as its open courseware initiative and the creation of an Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure, alongside smaller projects like the Law School’s digital commons repository. But we must expand these efforts; Yale must stand with its peers and take action by adopting a campus-wide open access policy. ...