Harvard Faculty Votes to Post Research Online

The Boston Globe recently featured an article (http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/02/13/harvard_faculty_votes_to_post_research_online/)

discussing how Harvard’s University Library is planning to instantly make professor’s finished papers available via the internet for FREE. Tentatively named “The Office for Scholarly Communication,” this office will serve to publish articles and act as a repository for faculty.

Publishers are very much against this proposal, claiming it would be detrimental to the peer review process. Even though journal editors may not be involved in this new approach, academics generally volunteer to peer-review colleagues’ work at no cost. So Publishers no doubt feel threatened by this move and if other institutions follow suit, this could lead to a radical change in how academic research is made available. This is good news for libraries from a budgeting standpoint.