Harvard Votes for Open Access

Harvard Votes for Open Access

This article from Inside Higher Ed reports on the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences vote for open access to scholarly publications. _____JH

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"Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty approved a plan on Tuesday that will post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have similar repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard’s is unique for making online publication the default option."

"The unanimous vote gives Harvard a 'worldwide license to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit,' according to a statement released after the vote. That license will be used to post the articles free online, where they could be crawled and accessed through search engines such as Google Scholar."

"Laura Brown, a senior adviser to the Ithaka project, which studies how information technologies can be applied to higher education, including electronic publishing, said she thinks the move could place Harvard in a leadership role on the issue. But she suggested that the effort was directed more at motivating faculty to fill the institution’s electronic repository. At other colleges, she said, such repositories often languish because there is no mandate. And with more content in the repositories, she said, it would be easier to study which methods of digital delivery work and how scholars use such databases."