The Harvard Open-Access Policies

The goal of university research is the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge. We collectively take this to be a good. It is an essential part of our duties as faculty members to distribute the fruits of our scholarship as widely as possible.

A committee established by Provost Steven Hyman has proposed a set of measures that Harvard can undertake to promote open access and move toward a more sustainable publishing system that is at the same time more in keeping with the goals of the University. One of these measures is for faculty to grant the University permission to make scholarly articles openly available. On February 12, 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences approved the first such policy, with several other schools following.

The policy works by setting up an automatic license to Harvard for scholarly articles authored by faculty members. This license is nonexclusive and enables open-access distribution, so long as the articles are not sold for a profit. Copyright remains with the author (until such time as the author may assign all or part to another entity). Harvard will use this license to enable it to distribute articles in an open-access repository whose contents will be searchable and available to other services such as web harvesters, Google Scholar, and the like. Contents of the repository will be maintained, archived, and preserved.

The license is transferable, so that the University can allow authors legally to distribute the articles on their own web sites if desired, and can allow educators here and elsewhere to provide the articles to students, for example, in course packs (not sold for a profit).

The policy is intended to serve the faculty’s interests by allowing articles to receive open distribution, simplifying authors’ retention of distribution rights, aiding preservation, and providing unified action to discourage publishers from rejecting articles because they will be available in open access. However, there may be individual cases in which the license works against the interest of a faculty member. In keeping with the spirit of the effort, the policy allows for waiver of the license or delay of distribution in such circumstances.

Additional resources are available at the links to the left, including text of the policies, further explanatory material, information about procedures, and a list of other resources.