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Harvard Considers Free Academic Publishing

Harvard faculty will soon vote on whether arts and sciences professors can distribute their scholarship online:

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

I'm not sure this is the greatest idea. Is the idea that they are cutting out the peer review process altogether? It doesn't seem (based on this NYTimes piece) that these articles will be vetted at all. Peer review is what academic journals provide to both contributors and readers - that's worth something. But this is my favorite part of the article:

The publishing industry, as well as some scholarly groups, have opposed some forms of open access, contending that free distribution of scholarly articles would ultimately eat away at journals’ value and wreck the existing business model. Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo.

I love the paranoia that an academic article might be in proximity to "a video clip of Briney Spears's latest" hairdo. Contamination!

Still, the end of the article points to the most important aspect of this whole thing - competition between open access publishing and scholarly journals:

Professor [Stuart] Shieber also doubts that free distribution would undermine the journal industry. “We don’t know if that would happen,” he said. “There is little evidence to support that it would.” Nearly all scholarly articles on physics have been freely available on the Internet for more than a decade, he added, and physics journals continue to thrive.

I doubt very much that this will cut into the profits of Routledge journals. Harvard can e-publish all the scholarship it wants, but I don't see how it will carry the same cultural/scholastic capital as Philosophy & Rhetoric or RSQ.

open access

Thanks for your post about Open Access. Just so you know, OA takes many forms. What Harvard recently approved was a digital repository for work already accepted by peer-reviewed academic journals, which would be publicly accessible. So in other words, there's no question about the integrity of the work one can access there.

There's actually a PR group called PRISM, which is composed of academic journal publishers opposed to OA. One of their recurrent arguments is that OA is going to undermine the integrity of peer-review. What they're suggesting is that OA implies anything goes, which, in most configurations, is hardly the case at all.

Anyway, thanks for your interest in OA. Peter Suber's website (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html) is a great place to go to learn more about these issues.