The Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC), the most recent addition to the Harvard University Library (HUL) portfolio, is off to a running start.

Who

Staffed by Stuart Shieber as faculty director, Amy Brand as program manager, and Tom Dodson as staff assistant, the OSC also works closely with OIS staff Randy Stern and Flemion Shafeeq on the systems development front.

What

The OSC’s current focus is implementation of the open-access policies passed last year by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Law School, calling for the routine deposit of faculty article manuscripts into an open-access repository. That repository, called DASH for Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, is now being populated, and dozens of student Open-Access Fellows have been engaged to support faculty in these efforts.

Where

OSC’s home is 210 and 211 Wadsworth House (stop by and visit!), and staff are often out and about on campus at department faculty meetings, library committee meetings, and discussions with others at the University who are invested in the success of the new policies and the development of alternative models for scholarly communication.

Why

The DASH repository, which will be unveiled to the public later this year, will greatly expand public access to the scholarship of Harvard faculty. It will also help to track and preserve Harvard’s research output, and engage publishers to work together toward unfettered institutional and public access to the peer-reviewed literature. As Program Manager Amy Brand is quick to note, “We are eager to collaborate with the broader Harvard library community in these efforts.”