Harvard Law School goes open access!

Harvard Law School just became the first law school to commit to open access (free publication with copy/share friendly licenses) in all its journals:

The faculty of Harvard Law School has unanimously approved a motion for open access: articles will be made freely available in an online repository. With the success of this motion, Harvard Law becomes the first law school to make an institutional commitment to open access to its faculty's scholarly publications. [full text of the motion]

The Berkman community is tremendously excited by the news, which resonates deeply with the Center's mission and helps set the stage for other academic institutions to establish open access policies. In February, Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences did just that, unanimously passing an open access motion spearheaded by computer science professor and Berkman faculty co-director Stuart Shieber. (In addition, Harvard College Free Culture has launched a free Thesis Repository!) Professor Shieber's work and leadership, along with that of Harvard library director Robert Darnton, paved the way for Berkman's own Terry Fisher and John Palfrey to bring this open access proposal to the Law School.

Link (Thanks, John!)

[#1 posted by smatheson , May 7, 2008 6:06 PM]

This is nice, and good for HLS faculty, but a small clarification: HLS faculty publications (now to be open) are not the same as the student-published journals like "Harvard Law Review."

HLS faculty publish in many journals, some published by Harvard students, some not. Conversely, because of heavy subsidies from law schools, the student-published journals that make up the bulk of academic legal literature have historically been among the cheapest and the most open to free access.

The rest of the legal literature - primary sources like caselaw and (as reported here) statutes are not so inexpensive. But see Legal Information Institute, http://www.law.cornell.edu.

[#2 posted by jpalfrey , May 7, 2008 6:37 PM]

Actually, the policy that we adopted is a bit different than that. What it means is that every faculty member agrees to give the university a nonexclusive license for every scholarly article we publish, regardless of the journal in which it is to be published. In turn, Harvard will be making all these articles -- again, regardless of the journal they'll be published in -- available in a free, online open access repository. (The policy is an opt-out: faculty may request a waiver for any given work.) The full text of the policy is on my blog at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/2008/05/07/hls-goes-open-access-unanimously/.

Best,
John

[#3 posted by glace neuf , May 8, 2008 9:54 AM]

interesting - i went to penn state, and on one of my tours when visiting a tour guide noted that penn state had the second largest library amongst universities, with harvard's being the first. apparently penn state's was/is(?) the largest that shares its collection with others though. not sure if this is still true, but good to see harvard getting some of their information out there to all!