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open access at Harvard

By catdynamics on February 15, 2008.

Will Harvard junior faculty publish first author Nature papers now?

I have to confess that with the experience of arXiv.org I am continually bemused by the fervour over open access in the rest of academia.

Now, I gather, Harvard has passed a faculty resolution mandating open access for all faculty scholarly publications - with faculty being asked to deposit PDF files with the library which will provide open access (I hope they are sensible and buy the arXiv archiving tools).

So what?
In astronomy, physics and math this is a non-issue, since essentially all journals that matter grant arxiv.org permissions automatically and it has been in the authors best interest to provide open access. Even Nature and Science permit arXiv.org reposting.

But, this is not the case in bio, med and other fields.
Now there is an opt-out provision, I gather, on article-by-article basis, through the relevant Dean!
Oh, yeah. That is going to work. It is hard enough to remember to get institutional preprint numbers assigned, or to provide department with copies of papers.
I can just see the head of a genetics lab doing 20-30 papers per year chasing this up.

But, the real interesting question is: "what is a faculty ``author''"?
I mean solo author, or first author, no problem. But what if it is a postdoc or student first author and faculty last author? What if it is a multi-author paper?
Will all large collaboration papers (and there may be 100++ authors on those) have to go this route if there is a single Harvard faculty co-author? Some of those collaborations publish a lot of papers.
Will junior faculty be able to publish in Nature or Science? Those journals will probably not accept this policy. I suppose even for Harvard faculty those are few enough per author that they can go to the Dean for waivers. The Dean will be rather busy with them though.

I do applaud the general sentiment of open access. I am somewhat skeptical about this implementation by fiat, I suspect we are in for some unintended consequences.

h/t coturnix

Tags
astro

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