Open-access repository for Harvard faculty

In a move to disseminate faculty research and scholarship more broadly, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has voted to give the university a worldwide licence to make faculty member’s scholarly articles openly available.

Reacting to the new licence, Provost Steven E. Hyman said: ‘The goal of university research is the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge. At Harvard, where so much of our research is of global significance, we have an essential responsibility to distribute the fruits of our scholarship as widely as possible. The action in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will promote free and open access to significant, ongoing research. It is a first step in the creation of an open-access environment for current research that may one day provide the widest possible dissemination of Harvard's distinguished Faculties' work.’

Harvard will take advantage of the licence by hosting FAS faculty members’ scholarly articles in an open-access repository, making them available worldwide for free. The faculty member will retain the copyright of the article, subject to the University’s licence. The repository contents can be made widely available to the public through search engines such as Google Scholar. The new legislation does not apply to articles completed before its adoption.