Steven E. Hyman, Provost of Harvard University, has charged the Harvard University Library (HUL) with creating an Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC). The goal of the new Office for Scholarly Communication is to enable individual faculty members to distribute their scholarly writings in keeping with the University’s long-standing policy that “when entering into agreements for the publication and distribution of copyrighted materials individuals will make arrangements that best serve the public interest.

In making his charge to the University Library, Provost Hyman noted that “the goal of university research is the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge. At Harvard, where so much of our research is of global significance, we have an essential responsibility to distribute the fruits of our scholarship as widely as possible.

The new Office for Scholarly Communication will be under the aegis of the distinguished historian Robert Darnton, who serves as Harvard’s Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library.

In responding to Provost Hyman’s charge, Professor Darnton stated, “The Harvard University Library has long been engaged by the many questions of open access that face the University, and we have worked closely with the Provost’s Committee on Scholarly Communication on the formulation of a policy that ensures Harvard’s leadership role in open-access endeavors. Rather than inviting faculty members to ‘opt in,’ as is the case with other open-access repositories, FAS has voted to give the University a worldwide license to each faculty member’s scholarly articles for open-access purposes, with an ‘opt out’ provision available.

Working in close collaboration with HUL’s Office for Information Systems, the new OSC will oversee an open-access repository for current research. The goal of the repository is to ensure the widest possible dissemination of the work of the Harvard faculty and to move toward a more sustainable publishing system.

Provost Hyman’s announcement follows on the February 12, 2008, vote in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) that grants an automatic license to Harvard for scholarly articles authored by FAS faculty members. This license is nonexclusive and enables open-access distribution, so long as the articles are not sold for a profit. Copyright remains with the author (until such time as the author may assign all or part to another entity). Harvard will use this license to enable it to distribute articles in an open-access repository whose contents will be searchable and available to other services including, but not limited to, web harvesters and Google Scholar.

Provost Hyman and HUL Director Darnton anticipate that the new Office for Scholarly Communication will be operating before the end of the fiscal year, and that its first concern will be to collaborate with Harvard’s faculties of Business, Design, Divinity, Education, Government, Law, Medicine, and Public Health on an open-access archive for current scholarly articles.

The new Office for Scholarly Communication will be instrumental in making good on the promise of the FAS open-access policy. It has the potential for worldwide impact through exemplary initiatives to maximize communication of scholarly research,” stated Stuart M. Shieber, the James O. Welch, Jr., and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science and the author of the motion accepted by FAS on February 12.