I am really excited about recent Har­vard Uni­ver­sity ini­tia­tive:

Har­vard University’s Fac­ulty of Arts and Sci­ences adopted a pol­icy this evening that requires fac­ulty mem­bers to allow the uni­ver­sity to make their schol­arly arti­cles avail­able free online.

Although the out­come of this 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. This is a big step for­ward push­ing pub­lish­ing inex­orably towards the “Open Access” model. As well as nice addi­tion to NIH Public-Access Pol­icy requirements.

The com­pre­hen­sive list of open access jour­nals can be accessed at doaj.org.

19th February, 2008 1 Comment