Harvard to vote on open access proposal
The NY Times reports that Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences will vote next week on a proposal that would require faculty to deposit a copy of their articles in an open access Harvard repository even as they submit those articles to academic journals.
I like this idea a lot. I only wish it went further. Faculty members will be allowed to opt-out of the requirement pretty much at will (as I understand it), which could vitiate it: If a prestigious journal accepts an article but only if it’s not been made openly available, faculty members may well decide it’s more important for their careers to be published in the journal. I would prefer to see the Harvard proposal paired with some form of official encouragement to tenure committees to look favorably upon faculty members who make their work widely and freely available.
Nothing is without drawbacks. A well-run, reliable, thorough peer-review system costs money. But there’s also an expense to funding peer review by limiting access to the work that makes it through the process. Likewise, while the current publication system directs our attention efficiently, but there’s a price to the very efficiency of such a system: innovation can arise from what looked liked inefficiencies. There’s value in the long tail of research.
If we were today building a system for evaluating scholarly research and for making it maximally available, we would not build anything like the current paper-based system. Well, we are building such a system. The Harvard proposal will, in my opinion, help.
Disclosure: I’m a fellow at the Berkman Center which is part of the Law School, not the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and I’m not a faculty member in any case. Stuart Shieber, one of the sponsors of the proposal, is a director of the Center.)
Kudos for Harvard A&S on this one. The academic journal business is all about the academic hierarchy game, tenure and promotion and is commanding a pretty penny for its captive contributors and audience. Once tenure and promotion committees recognize open journals, the academic journal business model heads down the same road as the aluminum-disk-coated-with-plastic business.
Since the vast majority of academic research is funded through the public purse in one way or another, it’s only reasonable that the public has free access to what it has paid for.
Good news: the Chronicle is reporting that they approved the measure in tonight’s vote. http://lquilter.net/blog/archives/2008/02/12/tentative-toe-blogging for relevant links.
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Thanks for the update, Laura — great news!
Now for next stage of the D-Lib revolution…
It’s not impossible to construct a means of peer-review that woulc be compatible with open access, is it? “Good Academicizing Seal of Approval” (GASA) etc.
Tom, not at all impossible. I should have been clearer: Doing peer review the way journals currently do it costs money. There are ways to do it that don’t cost money, or taht at least spread the costs sufficiently that people will do it voluntarily.
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