Harvard Frees Academic Resources
An inside source (hint: he navigates by smell) tipped off the ALR class that last week Harvard made a decision: any article published by Harvard faculty must also be published in a free database. The basic notion is that information produced by scholars should be free.
While the decision surely bears most directly on the sciences, it will apply with some force to law scholarship as well.
I'm all for it. Knowledge, as they say, is power. And I find selling access to power unpalatable. After all, if you write an article at UC Berkeley (a public institution), shouldn't it be available to the public?
Update: Here is an actual article on which to base your thoughts, rather than my idealistic pontification.
While the decision surely bears most directly on the sciences, it will apply with some force to law scholarship as well.
I'm all for it. Knowledge, as they say, is power. And I find selling access to power unpalatable. After all, if you write an article at UC Berkeley (a public institution), shouldn't it be available to the public?
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Labels: Technology Rants
posted by Patrick Bageant at 8:45 AM
4 Comments:
Should UC also dedicate all of its patents and the copyrights in books written by its professors to the public domain?
Yes, knowledge "should" be free. But it takes resources to make knowledge. Just something to think about.
I have searched and searched for publication or news on the decision Harvard purportedly made. No dice. I emailed BB again, and hopefully he has more information.
I'm not sure how to interpret 'resources to make knowledge' -- do you mean my tuition, tax dollars and (meager, meager) intellectual contribution to the campus community? Or do you mean research grants from zillionaire companies who end up turning the knowledge we make at this public school into private sector profits?
Either way, it's pretty likely Harvard thinks they can pay for whatever it is they are doing. They gots smarts 'n stuff.
When tenure decisions are made on the "quality" of publications, which depend on the perceived quality of where you publish, it's not as simple as you make it out to be.
There are likely lots of professors and researchers who would like to public their results in publicly available journal, but they may tank their career in the process. Many of the publicly avaiable journals simply don't have the cachet of subscription only journals.
And i say that fully supporting the move to open publication.
Right. But that's not the model Harvard is using. BB shared a link, which you can find on the main post.
The model is: Publish it where you want, keep the copyright, but license the the university to use the material. They will dump it into a free, searchable online database.
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