Social Science Statistics Blog: Open Access to All of Harvard's Articles

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Weihua An (Soc)
Kevin Bartz (Stats)
Sebastian Bauhoff (HealthPol)
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Jens Hainmueller (Gov)
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This blog makes public the hallway conversations about social science statistical methods and analysis from the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and related research groups. Expect to see posts on trends in methodological thought, questions and comments, paper and conference announcements, applied problems needing methodological solutions, and methodological techniques seeking applied problems. Also included are summaries of papers and comments from a popular weekly research workshop held here and billed as a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different disciplines. [read more...]

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14 February 2008

Open Access to All of Harvard's Articles

Consider this scenerio. I write a paper. I put it on my web site. The site now gets about 5 million hits a year. (Even if most of them are looking for directions to Gary Indiana, that's a fair amount of distribution.) But if I get lucky and the paper is published in the lead journal in some academic field, the journal prints around 15,000 copies and I'm supposed to take it off my web site. In what universe does this make sense?

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has at Harvard has now taken action to avoid this situation and adopted this policy:

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.
To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost's Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost's Office. The Provost's Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.

What do you think? Do you think your university could (or should) adopt this? (For more information, see this site.)

Posted by Gary King at February 14, 2008 3:28 PM

Comments

I am a strong believer in open access, especially for political science. So much of our discipline's work has direct / applicable implications outside the ivory tower and it is to political science's advantage to open this research to the public at large.

Posted by: Chris Albon at February 14, 2008 6:43 PM

I think that this is a good thing. My university (www.uva.nl) already partially has adopted this model of open access.

Posted by: contactlenzen bestellen at February 15, 2008 2:41 PM

I agree with Chris, but not totally. Why just for political science?

Posted by: Femina at February 16, 2008 4:00 PM

Agreed! There is no better way to take the science of politics to the people than free and open access to knowledge.

Posted by: Rob Mellen at February 17, 2008 1:58 AM

I agree, open source is the future. Everybody should have the right to this information, no matter what Background or Status.

Posted by: Smartminds are freaky at February 17, 2008 7:18 AM

I am agree with all af you. I know that humans are suspicious for many things that are not accesible.

Posted by: Nadal at February 18, 2008 3:20 AM

My university could adopt this, but won`t would to do this.

Posted by: Horatio at February 18, 2008 2:28 PM

Some universities in Europe are already adopting this way or working. Open source, if well controlled by the public and KOL's are the future I agree.

Posted by: geld lenen at February 22, 2008 4:34 PM

i'm just curious how many article would be distribute over the net?
or just put some simply code to access those article or distribute a book like negroponte?
or on what system this could be working

Posted by: The Net at March 6, 2008 12:35 PM

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