[A2k] Harvard Open Access and the significant move of Copyright Retention

[Armbruster, Chris]

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In a very interesting move, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard Uni=
versity on 12 February 2008 not only to adopted an open access mandate (onl=
ine dissemination of scholarly articles from an institutional repositories =
that is accessible freely) but also adopted the following

     [COPYRIGHT RETENTION POLICY] 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.

I am particularly interested to see the effects of this over the coming yea=
rs. In an article written for the Yale A2K2 conference, I advocated that un=
iversities should take a more pro-active approach to copyright and that non=
exclusive licensing was the optimal way to create a competitive market that=
 is highly compatible with open access to scientific knowledge (OA2SK). For=
 now, the Havard copyright retention policy enables opt-out on a case-by-ca=
se basis (in writing, to the Dean). The policy will be reviewed in three ye=
ars. I consider this the optimal university policy.

The original pre-print of the Yale A2K2 paper (Winner of the A2K2 writing c=
ompetition) is available here: http://ssrn.com/abstract=3D938119

"Cyberscience and the Knowledge-Based Economy, Open Access and Trade Publis=
hing: from Contradiction to Compatibility with Nonexclusive Copyright Licen=
sing"

The article was subsequently published in IJCLP: http://www.ijclp.net/

Chris Armbruster

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