Celebrations and Tough Questions Follow Harvard's Move to Open Access

In light of a decision by members of Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences to make access to their scholarly papers free, advocates of open access celebrated, but some publishers expressed concern. Members of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously to provide the university with copies of their published articles and permission to post them in a freely available online database. Harvard becomes the first American university to make open access to faculty articles a default position, requiring authors to opt out rather than opt in. Publishers of journals in the humanities and social sciences expressed reservations, some calling Harvard's policy shortsighted because it might result in the loss of subscription and reprint income to humanities and social-science journals. A lack of specificity about which articles would be put into Harvard's repository has also come under criticism.