Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; Faculty; Copyright; and Institutional Repositories

Recently, on February 12, 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard University took a landmark step.  The faculty voted to adopt a policy requiring that faculty authors send an electronic copy of their scholarly articles to the university’s digital repository and that faculty authors automatically grant copyright permission to the university to archive and to distribute these articles unless a faculty member has waived the policy for a particular article. Essentially, the faculty voted to make open access to the results of their published journal articles the default policy for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University.