EDITORIAL – The beginning of an open access era

Faculty members at Harvard University will decide Tuesday whether to make their scholarly… Faculty members at Harvard University will decide Tuesday whether to make their scholarly research free and accessible on the Internet, a development that would be a significant achievement in the open-access movement.

The proposal would change Harvard’s current practice by creating an “opt-out” system, in which papers written by faculty members in the university’s school of arts and sciences would be included in a open-access repository run by the library and available on the Internet, unless the authors specifically requested they not be.

Authors would still retain their copyrights to the material and could publish in scholarly journals, if the journals accept them, according to The New York Times.

Making scholarly articles free and accessible to the public would be the latest action taken in a trend toward opening up education to the masses, the value being, obviously, that a well-informed public is a better public. Several prominent universities, including MIT, Yale and Johns Hopkins have put syllabi and videos of lectures on the Internet, and iTunes currently operates a section called iTunes U, which posts more than 30,000 audio and video files from across the country.

Watching videos of a professor lecturing or reading the latest research on a topic aren’t replacements for a college education, and the universities posting the material know that. There’s still an enormous value in learning the material first-hand in class, getting feedback and evaluating your own knowledge through exams and writing assignments.

But the ability to access that information is a great equalizer. Putting scholarly information on the Internet promotes knowledge, whether it’s by allowing students at different educational institutions to sample another professor’s style or expertise or granting the opportunity for someone who is unable to go to college expand her knowledge.

Opponents of the Harvard proposal warn that it might have a negative impact on the journal market and that it could devalue the quality of scholarly and scientific research by allowing articles that have not gone through the rigorous process of peer review to be posted on the Internet.

Scientific and scholarly journals have had a long-standing history in academia, and we doubt that simultaneously publishing the articles free on the Internet will hurt the journal market.

Most likely, the people who would access information on the Harvard website will be casual readers, not journal subscribers, who are either looking for information pertaining to their particular interest or researching for their own papers and projects.

As for devaluing the quality of research, we’d hope that a researcher would submit his article to extensive peer review before allowing it to go online, particularly when his name is attached to the paper.

Essentially, putting scholarly information on the Internet doesn’t take away or devalue education and research – it reinforces it.

By posting faculty research online for free, Harvard would be setting the pace for what we hope becomes an era of open and free access to information.