In this morning’s New York Times, Patricia Cohen reports that that Harvard faculty will be voting later today on a proposal (the exact nature of which is not clear in the Cohen piece) to “permit Harvard [faculty?] to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.” Bob Darnton, the new University Librarian, is quoted as commenting that “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”

It is hard to tell exactly what is going on here, but let me try to guess (and I will return to this subject in the future). Darnton seems to be referring to the problem of STM (science, technology and medicine) journals published by large commercial publishers (Elsevier, John Wiley, and their ilk). The prices for STM publications from such sources have risen astronomically over the past decade (and more), and this has clearly constituted a huge burden for university libraries. There have been a number of open access responses to the STM journal problem, and it is possible that Harvard’s proposal is one of the many university-based responses. The typical response is to post articles on public or at least free Web sites, thereby avoiding the licensing fees charged by commercial publishers. Fine.

But I do not want to deal with the STM problem. The question that interests me is the availability of humanities and social science journal articles on the Web. Very few of these are published by commercial publishers. Most of them are published by nonprofit university presses, though some are published directly by learned societies. The interesting point is that almost all of the nonprofit publishers also protect their material by copyright, and charge licensing fees to access them. Compared to commercial publishers, the fees are low. For university faculty such fees are invisible, since their libraries pay the fees, and so long as faculty use university IP addresses to access the material, it is “free” to the user. Since academic presses are almost always required to break even on their operating costs, and since the average journal does not produce significant surpluses, the license fees provide crucial revenue for the publishers.

The point I want to make about the Harvard proposal is that it can be seen as a move to undercut nonprofit publishers as well as the commercial behemoths (if it is truly a proposal to post all Harvard faculty articles on the university Web site). Depending on the details, it might also be a proposal to bypass peer review, unless Harvard plans to set up its own peer-review process. What social science and humanities faculty have to debate is the merits of entering the world of preprint article circulation that has served the scientists so well. Our scholarship is, I think, significantly different that that of the scientists. Both copyright and publisher peer-review have a long and useful past in our world, and we would do well to think through the implications of abandoning them — though it is hard to imagine that this is what Harvard actually has in mind.