Harvard mandates open access to Arts and Sciences faculty research publications
Posted on February 13, 2008
Filed Under open access |
Late yesterday, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted on a measure to permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online. This will likely have major implications for the open access movement.
Links to articles about this in the New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Harvard Crimson: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/books/12publ.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin
http://chronicle.com/news/article/?id=3943&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521835>
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521861
–Beth McNeil
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If the Director of the Harvard University Library, Robert Darnton, really means what he says then the recent open access move of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences can be beneficial to University Press’s and the authors they publish. Darnton noted that the spiraling costs of journals have precluded libraries from buying academic monographs. The unwillingness of University Presses to publish monograph loss leaders has had the greatest effect on Liberal Arts scholars who have had trouble publishing their first monographs even as tenure committees in some areas are asking for more than one monograph for promotion. Of course, the indicated savings would have to be allocated to the library’s book budget whether digital or traditional.
The Harvard policy does underscore the need for University Presses to work with their libraries to foster accessible scholarship and distribution, and also finally makes clear that the problem of scholarship is a university issue. The Harvard policy allows for a three-year window in which to work out sticky issues that will arise including the application of the opt-out clause in the policy, the handling of peer-review in the new environment, and implication for promotion and tenure for authors whose articles are initially posted to the repository without appearing in traditional journals.
Harvard University has now accepted a large burden that academic publishers have for ages – delivering timely and peer-reviewed research that is suited to customers’ (faculty and researchers) needs. The cost of the policy will not be insignificant, but will the Harvard scholarly repository begin to reduce the overall price of scholarship? If other universities follow suit, the trump card many academic journals hold will lose value. An inter-university network will need to assume all the functional roles (including vetting, formatting, fact checking, etc.) of publishing, not just a few (posting and distribution).
Further, this policy underscores the lack of relevance many scholars have had for their institutional repositories. Scholars are not posting their works to the repositories. The Harvard policy calls for faculty member to provide the Provost’s Office a copy of the “final” version of the article, and the Provost’s Office “may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.” Harvard officials will create an office and repository for professors’ finished papers run by the university’s library which points out what University Presses have know forever – faculty teach and research and publisher capitalize the distribution of their work.
Moreover, among the several reason academics allow University Presses to publish their research is that the end product (book) is universally available. When a Harvard faculty member moves from Harvard, she would have to recreate her publishing record within a new repository structure at another university. Economically, this is hardly an efficient process.
Stuart Shieber, Harvard’s James O. Welch and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science commented, “This can be the first step in the process of increasing access to Harvard faculty’s writings. That’s really the goal. It isn’t to reduce prices or put journals out of business.” Unfortunately, the Harvard policy is all about the high price of journal literature, and some shoestring serials will be casualties of the move.
As the process unfolds, university presses, academic libraries, and university administrators will be able to evaluate the cost of scholarship within this new environment. In a way, the Harvard plan just moves funding around. Operating subsidies given to University Presses will probably look like a bargain after here years unless university administrators have the foresight to use their presses in the open access process.