Harvard Faculty Adopts Free Content Model

I’m surprised I didn’t hear more about this yesterday at Tools of Change, but Patricia Cohen had a story in the NY Times about the faculty at Harvard grappling with online publication:

“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…

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.”

You could counterargue that the “rigorous process of peer review” could emerge from open access, with a wider pool of peers to draw upon—in fact, one of the panels I attended Monday touched upon very similar themes, so I’ll have more to say on that after I’ve sifted through my notes… In the meantime, I just caught the Chronicle of Higher Education story indicating the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted for open access, in what computer science professor Steven Sheiber says is “a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.

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