David Bollier — Harvard Joins the Open Access Revolt

As the Guardian (UK) reports, the Harvard Faculty Advisory Council has sent a memo to 2,100 professors and researchers informing them that “major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised....”

Harvard’s announcement is expected to encourage many other research libraries to accelerate the migration to open access alternatives.  It’s a move that may take time, but is financially inescapable.  The average university library now pays about 65% of its budget for research journals, and more than half of that goes to the three major publishers, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. 

Read it at David Bollier | news and perspectives on the commons

Harvard Joins the Open Access Revolt

by David Bollier

Harvard gets behind an emerging trend toward regeneration of the commons through open source and open access.