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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
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What Is a 'Scholarly Article'? Tell Us More, Harvard.
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.
Posted at 11:43:26 AM on February 13, 2008 | All postings by Stan KatzComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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Thanks for this very thoughtful plea for more information and understanding.
In my view the Harvard FAS decision is terribly short-sighted.
If other universities follow suit it may effectively end an income stream for university presses –subrights revenue from reuse of articles—and further threaten the very modestly profitable social science and humanities journals published by presses. It could— over time — also compromise Project MUSE’s ability to provide support for the many university presses that collaborate in it.
In a distant day, when there is no academic journal publishing left to speak of, will universities take on the other tasks journals publishers have performed –organized formal peer review, editorial development, article revisions, marketing, sales, and promotion? And will they be willing to provide the greater support for their presses to continue to publish scholarship that journals publishing used to make possible?
It seems to me the motto of the medical community should also apply to our topsy turvy world of academic scholarship: do no harm.
The broad condemnation of “commercial” publishing that this development reveals is pretty breathtaking. The disregard for the impact on one’s local press and the larger role it plays is even more chilling.
— james jordan · Feb 13, 03:05 PM · #