Harvard Faculty Unanimously Agree To Establish Open Access Repository

Andrew Albanese & Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 2/13/2008

·   New OA repository managed by library

·   Opt-out provision will be watched

·   Publishers’ rep calls it “dispute over price”

In a historic first, Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) yesterday unanimously approved a motion that would compel faculty to deposit their research in an open access (OA) repository managed by the library to be made freely available to anyone via the Internet. Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton, in a pre-vote op-ed in the Harvard Crimson, declared that the motion "represents an opportunity to reshape the landscape of learning."

Under the proposal, individual members of the FAS would be directed to retain their copyrights, as opposed to assigning them exclusively to publishers as part of their publishing contracts, so their research could be made available. Faculty could still publish their articles in any journal that would not abridge Harvard's institutional repository rights. Darnton predicted the policy "would make scholarship by FAS freely accessible everywhere in the world, and it would reinforce a new effort by Harvard to share its intellectual wealth." Further, the plan could have major, transformative implications for the library, which would have the remarkable task of collecting and disseminating Harvard's faculty output in addition to its current roles.
 
Opt-out provision

The proposal, however, also includes an "opt-out" provision for faculty who do not wish to deposit their articles—a provision that could undermine or slow the benefits of the effort. Stevan Harnad, the leading voice in the call for mandatory author-archiving or "green" open access, praised the policy but told LJ it should not direct authors to retain copyright and instead should simply mandate deposit of their peer-reviewed final drafts immediately upon acceptance for publication. "The rest will take care of itself," he noted. Requiring copyright retention, he observed, could lead to "massive opt-out through the loophole it requires in order to make it adoptable in the first place." 

That will depend on the campus zeitgeist. Even editors of some journals supported the measure, the Crimson reported. English professor Stephen Greenblatt said, “This is one of the only ways we can break the backs of the monopolists who are currently seriously damaging our fields.” Darnton also took aim at the "the spiraling cost of journals" and its effect on libraries. 

The library will set up an Office for Scholarly Communication in an effort to have the open-access repository serve the entire campus, just as the HOLLIS catalog is the gateway to the more than 80 libraries in the university system. While repositories at other campuses have failed to get "a large proportion of faculty members to submit their articles," the new office will "promote maximum cooperation by the faculty." He noted that, while the measure applies only to the FAS, other faculty members, including those at Harvard Medical School, "face the same problems." 

"Dispute over price"

Allan Adler, VP for legal and governmental affairs at the Association of American Publishers, praised the opt-out provision in the Boston Globe but suggested that the new policy could damage the peer review process. "This is a vendor-customer dispute over price," he told the newspaper. "It doesn't surprise us that all libraries feel their budgets are far less than desirable, but that's a reality the educational community faces."