[Scholarly Communication] 

The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences has passed a groundbreaking open access requirement that will increase the exposure of research conducted at Harvard.

Some excerpts from the policy:

"Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles... The Dean or the Dean's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need."

"To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost's Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost's Office."

The University of California's faculty debated a similar policy in 2007, but it was not passed. Now that Harvard's faculty has taken this step, and in light of the new NIH public access law, there is likely to be renewed interest in this issue at UC and elsewhere.

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