Shots in the Dark
Wednesday, 13 February
Online Publishing: The Faculty Votes Aye
by As the Globe reports, Harvard's FAS voted yesterday to publish scholarly articles and research online for free.
Hundreds of professors voted unanimously for the change at a faculty meeting that culminated several months of meetings debating the move.
...Under the plan, Harvard officials will create an office and repository for professors' finished papers run by the university's library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. It would probably be called the Office for Scholarly Communication.
Would someone at Harvard please do the obvious thing, and initiate a university-wide plan to help professors set up their own web pages, so that they don't need an "Office of Scholarly Communication" (that's really what you're going to call it? Sheesh.) but can simply post their papers on their websites?
This is an interesting idea, because it will surely undermine the traditional peer review process, but might just make an entire audience of readers into peer-reviewers. (But we'll see if the OSC website has a "comment" function. I'll happily be proved wrong, but I'll bet you the answer is no.)
In the Chronicle for Higher Education, Princeton scholar Stanley Katz has some concerns about the Harvard plan:
The point I want to make about the Harvard proposal is that it can be seen as a move to undercut nonprofit publishers as well as the commercial behemoths (if it is truly a proposal to post all Harvard faculty articles on the university Web site). Depending on the details, it might also be a proposal to bypass peer review, unless Harvard plans to set up its own peer-review process. What social science and humanities faculty have to debate is the merits of entering the world of preprint article circulation that has served the scientists so well. Our scholarship is, I think, significantly different that that of the scientists. Both copyright and publisher peer-review have a long and useful past in our world, and we would do well to think through the implications of abandoning them — though it is hard to imagine that this is what Harvard actually has in mind.
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