Open access now mandated at Harvard
February 16th, 2008
Revere at Effect Measure reports that Harvard is now mandating that all faculty research in the School of Arts & Sciences be made available to the public immediately.
“The Harvard requirement mandates immediate free publication online in a Harvard hosted repository, searchable by Google and other search engines. Thus Harvard authors are not supposed to publish from now on in some extremely high profile journals like Nature and Science who prohibit fee access of papers for a period of time after publication. Whether these journals will publish Harvard papers under these conditions now is a question we don’t know the answer to. It could get very, very interesting.”
This is good news for Open Access, which I support in principle. But there is a problem. Many of us do much of our research and writing without funding. Open Access generally works by having the authors pay. When there is a funded grant, this is fine. But for some of us in smaller institutions which won’t pay te cost, this is a disincentive. I imagine that scholars in third world countries will also have problems with cost. Some mechanism needs to be developed to distinguish between funded and non-funded research.
Entry Filed under: Education, Research Methods, Science
2 Comments Add your own
1. Philip Small | February 16th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
I doubt Harvard, or even the smallest educational institution, is going to make faculty pay for meeting a mandate to self archive with open access. An electronic open access repository is a pretty inexpensive component of a University’s library capability in the whole scheme of things. Plus it attracts talent thus conceivably it “pays” for itself.
Open access of a specific model does work by having the authors pay, but there are several models that don’t, as the Harvard example attests to, and as the success of self archiving in combination with traditional publishing attests to.
Harvard faculty are adopting open access as a means of professional/academic survival. Traditional scientific publishing (transfer of copyright in lieu of payment) will also adapt as a means of survival. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
2. Elizabeth Pisani | February 17th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
I am greatly in favour of anything that increases public access to research. I do agree, however, that we don’t necessarily want to swap “pay per issue” through “pay per view” (both putting the burden on the consumer of science) to “pay per publication” which puts the burden on the producer.
But many of the costs of publication would essentially evaporate if we went to a 100% online model. I’d be interested to know what the unit cost per paper is for Nature vs PLoS.
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