Rethinking Teaching in the Sciences: April 7-27, 2008

Hi Paul, thanks for the link. I had never heard of the Public Knowledge Project & I was amazed to find out that over 1400 journals (not just in scientific fields) are using their Open Journal Systems. Clearly, a LOT of academics agree that scholarly publishing should be open! A good indicator of the vitality of an online community is how frequently & how recently people post to the forums & it's obvious that PKP is active indeed.

Harvard University is taking this one step further by making open access publication a REQUIREMENT. While surfing around I stumbled upon this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here are some snippets:

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy this evening that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.

... the new policy makes Harvard the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications.

...The new policy will allow faculty members to request a waiver, but otherwise they must provide an electronic form of each article to the provost’s office, which will place it in an online repository.

For anybody with an interest in the repercussions of open publishing, it's especially interesting to read the comments which follow the article!