Open Acess to Knowledge

On February 12 Harvard became the first U.S. University to mandate open access to research publications of their Faculty of Arts and Sciences. How important is this? Very. While the topic of open access has been thrown around in academic circles for some time, this is the first time that university faculty have stepped up as a group and acknowledged that the academic publishing paradigm fails when it comes to dissemination of knowledge in the Internet age.

Harvard's decision is a sign that the balance of power is changing. I'm not surprised the policy was proposed by a computer science professor. This is an example of open source philosophy spilling over into non-computer related fields. Open access will reshape the landscape of learning, replacing the closed, privileged, (and costly) system with a digital commonwealth available to all.

“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.”