The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) have announced that the SPARC-ACRL Forum during the 2008 American Library Annual Conference in Anaheim, California, will address the Harvard open access (OA) policy. The forum discussion, 'Campus Open Access Policies: The Harvard Experience and How to Get There', is co-sponsored by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services-Continuing Resources (ALCTS-CRS). The forum will give an up-close look at the recent vote by Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences enabling OA to their scholarly articles in an institutional repository.
The Harvard vote grants the university the rights necessary to archive and make freely available on the Internet articles written by arts and sciences faculty members. This is reportedly the first time the faculty of a US university has voted for an OA directive. It is also for the first time that a faculty has granted permission to the university to make its articles available through OA.
The forum is expected to offer an exploration of the motivations behind the Harvard policy, the groundwork invested in its creation, reactions and outcomes to date, and the broader implications of the historic step. Headlining the event will be Stuart M. Shieber, professor of computer science at Harvard, director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society, and the key architect of the policy. He will be joined by Catherine Candee, executive director, Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Initiatives, from the office of the president of the University of California, and by Kevin L. Smith, JD, scholarly communications officer at Duke University.
The 17th biennial SPARC-ACRL Forum is scheduled for June 28, 2008. The ACRL Scholarly Communications Discussion Group will additionally host an open conversation about issues that surface at the forum on June 29. The forum will be available via SPARC podcast at a later date.
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