I have now been able to read the Harvard Gazette account of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting yesterday at which it was voted to adopt the policy described so poorly in The New York Times on Tuesday. A Chronicle news-blog item on the vote is here.
I am somewhat clearer today than I was yesterday, but I have to say that the Harvard description does not make the policy very clear. Harvard has apparently decided to “host 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 license.” Faculty members will apparently be able to opt out of this arrangement, but I gather that the default is to participate. The Gazette does not define “scholarly article,” so it is hard to know what is covered by the policy.
Tony Grafton responded to my blog yesterday, explaining why the editors of a humanities journal might hesitate to accept an article thus posted for publication in their journal, and Sandy Thatcher (one of the most accomplished and responsible academic press directors I have ever known) has explained carefully what the current search environment is for licensed academic press databases such as the Johns Hopkins University Press Project Muse — one of the largest and most important humanities databases. These are serious issues, possibly mostly relevant in the humanities, and worth further consideration.
I want to raise what seems to me to be the fundamental ambiguity in the Harvard action — recognizing that the university may be about to publish a document that will clarify the matter. The issue for me is: What is a “scholarly article”? The sciences have had a long tradition of dealing with “preprints,” and some of the science fields, such as computer science, have novel methods of dealing with issues of peer review. But beyond the problems raised by Tony and Sandy, which have to do with the relationship of an early post to a future “publication,” at what point does my draft intended for an external audience constitute an article? In the good old analog days, “article” meant something formally published in a journal. When does the Harvard assistant professor of English (or whatever) have to move the essay from her hard drive to the Harvard website? To what extent am I publishing when I put my essay on my personal Web page (as I do)? I think this is a consequential issue, and until we have thought this sort of problem through more clearly, patting ourselves on the back about “free open access” is merely cheap self-congratulatory talk.
Tell us more, Harvard.
