Harvard OA in NYTimes

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

February 12, 2008
At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web
By PATRICIA COHEN

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring 
university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will 
decide on Tuesday is whether to publish - on the Web, at least - 
free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would 
permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of 
signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often 
have tiny readerships and high subscription costs. Although the 
outcome of Tuesday's vote would apply only to Harvard's arts and 
sciences faculty, the impact, given the university's prestige, 
could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to 
make scientific and scholarly research available to as many 
people as possible at no cost. "In place of a closed, privileged 
and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to 
everyone who wants to learn," said Robert Darnton, director of 
the university library. "It will be a first step toward freeing 
scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by 
making it freely available on our own university repository."

Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an 
open-access repository run by the library that would instantly 
make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain 
their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased - 
including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have 
them.

What distinguishes this plan from current practice, said Stuart 
Shieber, a professor of computer science who is sponsoring the 
faculty motion, is that it would create an "opt-out" system: an 
article would be included unless the author specifically 
requested it not be. Mr. Shieber was the chairman of a committee 
set up by Harvard's provost to investigate scholarly publishing; 
this proposal grew out of one of the recommendations, he said. 
The publishing industry, as well as some scholarly groups, have 
opposed some forms of open access, contending that free 
distribution of scholarly articles would ultimately eat away at 
journals' value and wreck the existing business model. Such a 
development would in turn damage the quality of research, they 
argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous 
process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily 
as a video clip of Britney Spears's latest hairdo. It would also 
cut into subsidies that some journals provide for educational 
training and professional meetings, they say. J. Lorand Matory, a 
professor of anthropology and African and African American 
studies at Harvard, said he sympathized with the goal of bringing 
down the sometimes exorbitant price of scientific periodicals, 
but worried that a result would be to eliminate a whole range of 
less popular journals that are subsidized by more profitable 
ones.

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copyright 2008 The New York Times