Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, and a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society attended this virtual meeting.
Peter began by summarizing The Harvard rights-retention policy. By faculty vote, it gives the university non-exclusive rights to future faculty journal articles (not to other types of genres). Under the policy, Harvard has the right to upload manuscripts to its repository and make them open access, and faculty may still publish in journals of their choosing; the policy merely asks them to deposit a certain version in the institutional repository. The rights-retention aspect of the policy is compatible with signing contracts granting other rights to publishers. This is the default position. A waiver is an option on a case-by-case basis. Waivers only opt-out of the “license” or the permission previously granted to make a given work OA. Waivers do NOT affect the expectation to deposit works in the repository. Most waivers are due to a demand by the publisher and are requested in less than 5% of cases. Authors affirm their grant of nonexclusive rights to Harvard via an online form. This process has the backing of Harvard lawyers.
Peter noted that Harvard’s nine nearly-autonomous schools each required separate policies. By contrast, MIT, a more unified institution, has adopted one institution-wide policy. He emphasized the need for the Open Access team to be fully prepared to answer questions from faculty and other institutional authors and for the need to gain faculty support. Peter and his colleague Stuart Shieber maintain a continuously-updated guide to good practices for university OA policies, focusing on rights-retention policies.
The goal for the next three PACT meetings is to explore scholarly societies’ perspectives about trends in scholarly communication and alternative publishing models.