Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences has reportedly voted for a policy that allows the university to make their scholarly articles available online for free. Under the proposal, Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open access (OA) repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet.
The copyrights of the articles will be held under Harvard's licence. However, faculty members can request a waiver of the licence for particular articles. The latest legislation does not apply to research articles submitted before its adoption.
According to industry observers, though the outcome of this vote would apply only to Harvard's arts and sciences faculty, given the university's prestige, the impact could be significant for the OA movement. The movement has been working toward making scientific and scholarly research available for free.
The publishing industry, as well as some scholarly groups, have opposed some forms of OA, contending that free distribution of scholarly articles would ultimately eat away at journals' value and wreck the existing business model. They argue that such a development would damage the quality of research, and also cut into subsidies that some journals provide for educational training and professional meetings.
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