Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences goes Open Access

n recent years, the Open Access movement in academic publishing has been gathering steam, with the growth of open access journals such as PLoS and mandates from funding bodies such as the NIH that require authors to deposit copies of their work into open databases. Now that 800lb. gorilla of academe, Harvard University, has started to throw its weight behind the spread of Open Access publishing. Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences has voted to require faculty to make copies of their research freely available through the Office of Scholarly Communications.

One of the great promises of the internet revolution has been the democratization of knowledge. Armed just with a computer and way of connecting to the internet, it is possible to find information on just about any topic known to humankind. In academia, the spread of the digital age has been most effective. Instead of having to spend hours in dusty stacks looking for the right volume of an obscure periodical, a few seconds using PubMed, Google Scholar, or any one of a number of databases will often yield up an electronic copy.

But electronic journal subscriptions are horrendously expensive, often costing hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for each title (and that's a discounted rate). Even the most well-endowed US institutions find these fees burdensome, but for foreign schools—especially those in less-developed nations—these journals remain out of reach.

The proposal(PDF), which was voted on yesterday, requires that faculty members "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." Authors will be able to request an exemption in writing, but the default state will be for new research to be made available to all.

This move comes in advance of a law that comes into effect this year, requiring any recipients of NIH funding as of October 1, 2007 to submit an electronic copy of any publication to PubMed, and it is thought that this move by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will lead the way for Harvard Medical School to do the same.

Not everyone is the biggest fan of Open Access publishing, it has to be said. Companies like Reed Elsevier see it as a massive threat to their bottom line, and many other smaller journals are often the primary source of income for the scientific societies that publish them. Despite these objections, the mood within the academy seems to be in favor of Open Access, and as more funding bodies across the world require their grant recipients to make their research Open Access, it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

Original here