Harvard new policy: make your scholarly articles available free online
February 14th, 2008 by joseThis is big. Harvard University has a new policy: make your scholarly articles available free online.
As Slashdot commenter hawk describes it:
The academic publishing industry is a dinosaur in desperate need of elimination. It charges tens of thousands of dollars per school for journals that would be more useful as web sites–, not and available several months earlier. As it exists, journals are for the benefit of the publishing companies, not the world at large, academia, or the authors. The economic model is that the faculty write, are paid nothing, and the libraries pay huge fees to the publishing houses.
Will the publishers react to open up? I doubt it; they can’t.
The *real* result of this will be top articles going to online journals, which will first rival and then displace the printed journals. This is a good thing for everyone except the publishing houses.
But what’s in it for me, the end user of the paper? First, faster review cycles. Second, my ideas will reach a wider target (those who are not affiliated with a powerful library and cannot access them otherwise). Third, the ideas will get there faster. Forget about the close to a year delay between accepted and printed. Seeing “In press” in the reference list may be a thing of the pass soon. Fourth, if everything is online (imagine a journal article with a ‘comments’ section, open to anyone), then soft peer review is even easier and more transparent.
Nothing of this should be news, most people have their articles online anyway… but it sometimes breaks the agreement you have with the paper journal. Now that a large university makes this practice a policy, we’ll see other universities follow up soon.
February 14th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
[...] Harward now requires their researcher to put their work online and allow free access. I think this could be really interesting if more universities make the same decision, it would [...]
February 14th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
The news was covered yesterday in the BOAI forum. Harvard is certainly not an early adopter, but it’s good to see more big universities or research institutions join the campaign.
February 15th, 2008 at 2:17 am
This is wonderful except for one caveat. As a freelance editor/copyeditor/proofreader, I’m deeply concerned that the quality of scholarly articles will suffer. Who will impose the finer points of house style that authors don’t know or understand? Who will query poor grammar and word usage before the article is accessible to the wider scholarly community?
Perhaps the best model is for universities to not only host the sites where the article are published, but to also employ a full-time editorial staff to oversee basic editing and production.
Lynn Allan Kauppi, PhD
Codex Editorial Services
Antioch, Tennessee
USA
February 15th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Lynn, the OA model is neither advocating against academic journals as the privileged vehicle of scholarly communication nor in favour of self-editing. Take a look at Peter Suber’s introduction to OA for a good overview of what Open Access is about. A detailed analysis of the Harvard initiative and a comparison with former initiatives by other institutions (such as the NIH) has just been posted by Stevan Harnad.
February 16th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
[...] raiz de la noticia de que Harvard new policy: make your scholarly articles available free online, y en relación a la anacrónica situación actual que se produce entre las posibilidades de [...]
September 7th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
This initiative follows the same concept as open source for programming. The best information can be obtained by all when information is free for everyone to collaborate. Wikipaedia is a fine example of this concept in action.
September 13th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
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November 26th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
This initiative follows the same concept as open source for programming. The best information can be obtained by all when information is free for everyone to collaborate. Wikipaedia is a fine example of this concept in action.