Thomas W. Benson: February 2008 Archives

Recently Harvard University's Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted for a policy that would open the published journal articles of all its faculty to all readers through an on-line archive. An article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the first wave of reactions to the new policy. Open access advocates praise the policy, but some are concerned, among them Sanford Thatcher, director of the Penn State University Press and president of the Association of American University Presses. According to the Chronicle, Thatcher "calls Harvard's policy "shortsighted" because it might result in the loss of subscription and reprint income to humanities and social-science journals. His own press receives two-thirds of its journal income through royalties from Project Muse, an online collection of journals. "If that were to collapse," he says, "so too would our journals disappear from the face of the earth."

The Harvard faculty voted to approve the measure on February 12, 2008, as reported in the Harvard Gazette the next day.