Wednesday, February 13, 2008

An important victory for Open Access


Inside Higher Ed reports:

Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty approved a plan on Tuesday that will post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have similar repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard’s is unique for making online publication the default option.

This is an important victory. As Peter Suber observed, "Harvard will be the first university in the US to adopt an OA mandate. The Harvard policy will also be one of the first anywhere to be adopted by faculty themselves rather than by administrators." He has more here.

1 Comments:

  1. Unknown said...

    IISc has an e-repository http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/index.html in which several faculty participate. Many of my papers and yours, Abi, are on it. This was an initiative of (the late, tragically) T B Rajasekhar of NCSI. I don't know if IISc faculty can be persuaded to go for this universally as the default option, but one could at least encourage people to allow NCSI to place their papers on it. I note that not all your entries on that repository are full-text. How come? By the way, even many ACS journals are coming round on the matter of posting on archives like arXiv. At least J Phys Chem has, thanks to the initiative of one of its editors, Arun Yethiraj. And Science and Nature allow it as well.