[Insight-users] OPEN ACCESS: Harvard Faculty Adopts Open-Access Requirement - Chronicle.com

[Luis Ibanez]

http://chronicle.com/news/article/3943/harvard-faculty-adopts-open-access-requirement

February 12, 2008
Harvard Faculty Adopts Open-Access Requirement

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy this
evening that requires faculty members to allow the university to make
their scholarly articles available free online.

Peter Suber, an open-access activist with Public Knowledge, a nonprofit
group in Washington, said on his blog that the new policy makes Harvard
the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its
faculty members’ research publications.

Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard who
proposed the new policy, said after the vote in a news release that the
decision “should be a very powerful message to the academic community
that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and
disseminated.”

The new policy will allow faculty members to request a waiver, but
otherwise they must provide an electronic form of each article to the
provost’s office, which will place it in an online repository.

The policy will allow Harvard authors to publish in any journal that
permits posting online after publication. According to Mr. Suber, about
two-thirds of pay-access journals allow such posting in online
repositories. —Lila Guterman


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Excerpt of the adopted policy:

[COPYRIGHT RETENTION POLICY] Each Faculty member grants to the
President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available
his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those
articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty
member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to
exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his
or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others
to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.


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