Harvard's New Office for Scholarly Communication

Complementing the recent vote by Harvard's Arts & Sciences as well as Law School faculty to make their scholarly articles openly available, Harvard University Library (HUL) with be establishing 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'. . . . Working in close collaboration with HUL's Office for Information Systems, the new OSC will oversee an open-access repository for current research."

In addition to supervising and executing the University's new open-access policy, the Office for Scholarly Communication will be engaged in such activities as digitizing Ph.D. dissertations, publishing diverse gray literature, sponsoring conferences. It will also have as a primary concern the engaging of other Harvard faculty in the new open-access policies. The OSC will be overseen by a faculty advisory committee.