Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.
Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.
Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost.
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Steven Harnad, as expected, has some criticism of the Harvard scheme(http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0802/msg00034.html)
And note Dan Cohen's A Quartet of Open Access Arguments
I am not against this, in principle, but as a publisher of academic books and periodicals—reasonably priced!—I do object to this:
"freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers"
Do I look like a strangler? Maybe you better not answer that!
James
Something that bugs the living heck out of me is that in this day and age, someone like me cannot get online access to journals, even as an alumnus or even if I pay for a 'community reader' card at an academic library. A few months ago I cast about looking for any academic library which gave access to someone who was not a student or prof at the institution and came up empty. For two decades I have held my breath that it could be possible to be an independent scholar with computer access and it still is far , far away.
I know how you feel, I recently graduated Columbia and moved to Stony Brook. Columbia has a much better library system than SBU, including much better online journal access than the physical and online access of SBU combined. At the end of last semester, Columbia shut me off from online access, unless I physically go to the library and use it, which is a bit more of a pain than ILLing everything.
At this point I would be willing to pay to get my Columbia access back, though not too much.
See also, "Harvard Opts In to ‘Opt Out’ Plan", insidehighered.com:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/13/openaccess
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