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The issue of how American universities can provide broader access to scholarly work by their faculty members, which started at Harvard University this year, has made its way to Columbia's campus.

On Oct. 8, the University Libraries/Information Services launched the first of a series of six talks on scholarly communication topics. The kickoff speaker was Stuart Shieber, the architect of Harvard's pioneering "open access" policy, which requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available online for free. Shieber is also a professor of computer science and director of Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication.

The goal behind the move, said Shieber, is to broaden access to the faculty's collective scholarly output. As a result, faculty members must provide an electronic form of each article they write to the Harvard provost's office, which places it in an online repository. Harvard's arts and sciences faculty approved the policy in February, and was quickly followed by faculty at the law school. Stanford's School of Education instituted such a policy shortly after Harvard did, and the move is being considered by other universities.

The policy "makes a collective statement of principle that we think it's important that there be the broadest possible access to our writings," Shieber said at the Columbia talk, which took place in Lerner Hall. In the past, each faculty member would sign a different contract with different publishers, some of which did not give them the rights to quote their own work, or for the university to use the materials for teaching.

Specifically, faculty members granted the university a nonexclusive license for all articles they write for scholarly journals. The license is transferable, so that the university can allow authors to distribute the articles on their own Web sites, and educators at Harvard or other universities are allowed to provide the articles to students in course packs, as long as they are not sold for a profit. In order to make sure that the policy can not stand in the way of the best interest of the authors, a waiver of the policy will be issued for every article at the sole discretion of the author.

Columbia doesn't have as specific a policy, although in 2005, the University Senate unanimously endorsed an open access resolution, which was introduced by the Senate's Committee on Libraries and Academic Computing. Though it is not yet an official University policy, the University Libraries is working toward one, said James Neal, vice president for information services and the University librarian.

In addition to the speakers series that featured Shieber as its first guest, Columbia "is providing access to an expanding array of open access electronic journals and other resources," Neal said. "We are supporting our faculty and researchers in their negotiations with publishers, in their posting of papers in institutional, disciplinary, government and personal open access repositories. We will work with the faculty to advance discussion of such a policy at Columbia."

Criticism of open access has centered on the idea that it would kill the peer review process involved in scholarly journals, or that it could put the journals out of business. Shieber said the policy "is not an alternative to the peer review process; it's a supplement. The peer review process stays exactly as it was before...It's just that in addition to that, we now have an alternative means of getting access to articles written by Harvard authors."

As to concern that Harvard's open access system could put scholarly journals out of business, or that publishers will balk, Shieber said that was unclear.

"It's too soon to make much in the way of general statements about publisher reaction," said Shieber. "Certainly, different publishers have had different reactions...None, of course, refuse to publish Harvard faculty articles because of the policy."

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