Making waves
A friend of mine, wholly unconnected with academia or libraries or scholarly publishing, IMed me last night about Harvard’s bold faculty-governance move. “This will make waves, won’t it?” he asked.
I hope so. I surely do hope so. This could change the Great Game in repository managers’ favor. I am in complete agreement with T. Scott Plutchak that this could turn out bigger than the NIH public-access policy. Peter Suber has good commentary as usual. I want to reproduce the text, because I know I have readers who don’t read Peter. (I have no idea why this is and it makes no sense to me, but there you are.)
On behalf of the Provost’s Committee on Scholarly Publishing, Professor S. Shieber will move:
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. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.
To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.
The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.
(As I was working on the above, Johnette Napolitano’s “You’re Amazing” came over the radio. I can dig it. Harvard is pretty amazing!)
I do see one small linguistic loophole, which perhaps Harvard could amend. The policy does not specify by whom “articles… sold for a profit” and therefore exempt from the policy need be sold. As I read that, theoretically a faculty member could claim exemption on behalf of the publisher selling the articles! I doubt that will happen, but the policy really ought to read “sold for a profit by the Faculty member.” (My misreading. The point here is that Harvard can’t turn around and sell the articles, which is perfectly fair and reasonable.)
Let me pretend for a moment that Achaea U followed Harvard’s example, so that I can work through some of the implications using Ulysses Acqua and the Basketology department.
Ulysses is dancing in his cubicle! He no longer need fret about approaching Dr. Troia or anyone else in Basketology for licensing. He can now canvass Basketology’s website for CVs, or ask for the results of yearly Basketology activity reviews, and just fetch-and-deposit from this day forward. No muss, no fuss, no hassle from Dr. Troia or anyone else. He need not try to teach Menelaus Fox to approach faculty about open access, nor play futile marketing games with his nonexistent budget. He need not pester unresponsive developers to fix the licensing process in his IR software; all he has to do is make the default license refer to the Harvard policy.
He may not be entirely out of the licensing woods. One use for Achaea’s IR is the archival of papers from small conferences held on campus. These conferences involve faculty from outside Achaea U, of course. Still, a simple Memorandum of Understanding with the conference organizers should suffice; that puts the onus on the conference to confer with its presenters.
All is not gravy for Ulysses; he’s a bit like Tom Thumb in the cow’s stomach. Achaea U produces vastly more output than Ulysses can possibly collect manually. Even should he enlist Menelaus and his colleagues to help, they will all drown in the flood of articles if the deposit process is not semi-automated. Fortunately, Achaea’s announcement has enough high-level weight behind it that Ulysses can point out this problem and land some IT time to deal with it. There are ways… the BibApp, RSS search feeds from various article aggregators, a SWORD-based deposit process, a front-end discovery-and-download environment based on RefWorks or Zotero for out-of-the-way disciplines like Basketology.
On the whole, though, Ulysses can only be thrilled at this turn of events. His relationship with Achaea faculty has been transformed; he had been little more than a nag and a pest, but now he is providing a service in clear alignment with expressed faculty wishes. He has new stature inside his library—everybody knows what he does and why he does it now, and library administrators are getting him student help to deal with the flood. He can even help Cassandra by bringing her situation to the IT folks working on his deposit processes; they readily agree to write him some output filters and Javascript includes, since they’re working on the repository anyway.
Ulysses is also aware that the balance of power between him, faculty, and publishers has undergone a subtle but significant shift. Previous to Achaea’s declaration, it was Ulysses who had to interrupt Dr. Troia’s day to ask her to license her work to the repository and perform keystroke labor. Dr. Troia is perfectly pleasant, but she isn’t fond of interruptions, much less extra work. Publishers, on the other hand, were a normal part of Dr. Troia’s work life. They didn’t have to bother her to acquire her work; she went to them.
Achaea’s blanket license changes the game. Ulysses can do his work without once bothering Dr. Troia. A publisher who objects to Achaea’s policy, however, has to interrupt Dr. Troia’s day to ask her to exempt her article from deposit, which involves extra work for Dr. Troia. (The extra work tidbit was very clever of Harvard. Well done!) Dr. Troia will not be pleased—and as I have noted before, publishers have consistently shied away from displeasing faculty.
I am suddenly bullish on IRs, for the first time in quite some time. Mind you, I will turn bearish again if Harvard turns out to stand alone, as is quite possible—I don’t see a mad rush to copy MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative. However, the policy spadework done by SPARC and John Ober’s crew and others has specifically been in a research rather than teaching context, so perhaps Harvard’s example will prove easier to follow than MIT’s. If I were influential in the CIC (which I am emphatically not), I’d be pushing for this as a followup to the author-addendum work.
Interesting times. Interesting times. IRs are back in the game! Thanks to Harvard for making waves.