Academic

Open Access to Scholarship: Recent Developments and a Comment

By Lawrence Solum

Michael Carrol recently wrote about two significant developments in open-access to academic work.  Here is an excerpt from Carrol's contribution to the cyberprof listserv:

1. Harvard.

Yesterday, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted in favor of a policy under which each faculty member agrees to grant to Harvard a non-exclusive license to make their scholarly articles freely available through the institution's digital repository or otherwise so long as it is not done for profit. This is a pre-commitment strategy that means the license will have been granted prior to any copyright transfer to a journal publisher. When an article has been accepted for publication, the faculty member will have to alert the publisher to the previously-granted license. In many cases, this will also mean the publisher's copyright transfer form will have to be amended. Faculty can seek a waiver of the university's license on an article-by-article basis. This is big news because it's a bottom-up initiative driven by faculty authors. The mechanics of the pre-commitment strategy are not as new as they may seem. Every federally-funded researcher grants the funding agency a non-exclusive copyright license at the time the copyright vests as part of the funding agreement. For more information on the Harvard policy, see my blog www.carrollogos.com.

2. NIH.

In December, Congress voted to require that NIH make the author's final manuscript of any peer reviewed journal article reporting NIH-funded research publicly accessible over the Internet through PubMed Central not later than 12 months after the date of publication. Since universities are the recipients of NIH grants, it is the university that is contractually bound to make sure that (1) NIH receives the author's final manuscript (after peer review) when the article is accepted for publication and (2) a copyright license to make the article publicly accessible not later than a year after publication. The policy becomes effective in April, and universities are now scrambling to figure out how they're going to ensure that their faculty authors don't sign away too many rights under copyright such that the university is non-compliant with its grant obligations. (Non-compliance can result in a range of sanctions including ineligibility for future funding.) Again for details, see my blog.

For more, see Michael's blog,

I agree with Carrol's comments--these are interesting developments.  It occurs to me that scholarly associations (APA, APSA, AALS, etc.) could also play a role here.  Shouldn't all of these organizatoins be on record as favoring open-access scholarship and opposing closed-access policies by scholarly journals?

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on February 15, 2008 (boomark / email).