There’s a movement afoot. Towards open-access academic journals. Traditionally, academics published their works in peer-reviewed journals, the more widely recognized, the better. If you want to read a scientific publication, you had to access it through a subscription held by your institution. If they lacked a subscription to a particular publication, many times you were out of luck, unless you contacted the author directly and asked for a reprint, or waited weeks for interlibrary loan (which can be a real pain if you’re in the middle of writing an article of your own).
Open-access journals are also peer-reviewed, but academic work is disseminated free to the public. Several open-access journals have started in the last few years, including all the publications from PloS. The National Institutes of Health requires that any scholarly work funded by the agency be made freely available through PubMed, though finding free articles here is still hit and miss.
The faculty of the College of Arts & Sciences at Harvard voted this month to require that all faculty publications be open-access to encourage freedom of information.
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. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.
Stuart M. Shieber, a professor at FAS, said, “There is no question that scholarly journals have historically allowed scholars to distribute their research to audiences around the world. But, the scholarly publishing system has become far more restrictive than it need be. Many publishers will not even allow scholars to use and distribute their own work. And, the cost of journals has risen to such astronomical levels that many institutions and individuals have cancelled subscriptions, further reducing the circulation of scholars’ works.
There are also smaller, more specialized journals going open-access as well. For those anthropologists with a museum focus, the University of Iowa is hosting Museum Anthropology Review
whose purpose is the wide dissemination of articles, reviews, essays, obituaries and other content advancing the field of material culture and museum studies, broadly conceived.
The more universities that adopt open-access policies, and the more journals that make their offerings available for free, the better for everyone.
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Sources: Harvard to collect, disseminate scholarly articles for faculty
FAS February 2008 Agenda (pdf)
