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13 February 2008
Harvard Vote to Open Access Publish
Posted by Richard Wallis at February 13, 2008 12:27 AM
As reported on nytimes.com, Harvard faculty members are scheduled to vote on Tuesday on the proposal to publish on the Web free.
Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost.
“In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”
Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.
What distinguishes this plan from current practice, said Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science who is sponsoring the faculty motion, is that it would create an “opt-out” system: an article would be included unless the author specifically requested it not be.
If the vote is carried, and the opt-out of Open Access publishing by default spreads across the rest of the faculties and to the wider world, this could be the beginning of a seismic shift in scholarly publishing.
Of course there are many steps between a single vote at one of the world's most prestigious universities and the collapse of the scholarly publishing industry as we know it - but stranger things have happened in other industries.
Thinking down the same path brings one to wonder about the journal aggregators, knowledgebase providers, scholarly networks, and the whole patchwork of interdependence that has grown up around the way we publish, review, and provide content back to the institutions from whence it came for the benefit of those that follow. Currently a heck of a lot of money changes hands to facilitate that loop.
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