By Martha Whitehead, Vice President for the Harvard Library and University Librarian and Roy E. Larsen Librarian for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
This year, we are celebrating International Open Access Week and the reprised theme of Community over Commercialization. The principle of being driven first and foremost by community needs and values is foundational to our work at Harvard Library. And it is ever-present in the way we do this work: by forming strong partnerships across Harvard Library and the University, building bridges with collaborators around the globe, and working in harmony as we progress toward our goal of advancing open knowledge.
As we emphasized last year, our concerns are with commercial models of open access publishing that rely on levying high-price article processing charges (APCs) on the author-side of publications in exchange for removing access and reuse barriers from the reader-side. These models will not secure the future of open access. On the contrary, APCs—and the “transformative” agreements that are based upon them—simply shift economic burdens and crowd out the less wealthy in favor of whoever can afford to pay.
Instead of commercially driven barriers to scholarly outputs and research data, we remain committed to the approaches long championed by advocates of the open access movement. Chief among them are rights-retention policies implemented by academic institutions and research funders to enhance access, reuse, and sharing of scholarship through open repositories, and community-supported, open access publishing models that charge no reader- or author-side fees.
Demonstrating the need for paywall-free access to research and the power of “Harvard style” rights-retention policies, our open access, institutional repository DASH has surpassed 65 million worldwide downloads of Harvard-authored scholarship across 58,000 works. This milestone additionally showcases the importance of durable open infrastructure. In fact, over the next year, DASH will migrate to the most advanced version of DSpace, the community-driven and open-source software underlying the repository, to improve interoperability and provide a more user-focused experience. Moreover, DASH is working towards compliance with the “desirable characteristics of digital publication repositories” by participating in the US Repository Network (USRN) Discovery Pilot project. This initiative, led by SPARC and COAR, aims to improve discoverability, interoperability, and tracking of research outputs in US repositories.
In addition to its stewarding of DASH, Harvard Library also collaborates with other open access repositories within and beyond the Harvard community. Now openly available through Harvard Dataverse, the Chinese Maritime Customs Data Collection draws from the extensive Chinese Maritime Trade Statistics held by Harvard-Yenching Library and covers key aspects of Chinese trade from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. The dataset represents one of the most detailed and reliable sources for studying economic and urban development in China during this period. Released into the public domain, this open dataset aims to facilitate new research and encourages unfettered reuse by historians of economics, historical trade analysts, and other scholars around the world.
To align with data sharing policies and support open data, Harvard Library encourages the use of generalist repositories to facilitate the broad sharing of Harvard research. In addition to Harvard Dataverse, the university provides dedicated access to Open Science Framework (OSF) and Vivli for the appropriate data sharing needed by various communities. And Harvard’s OSF research collection continues to grow. Librarians across Harvard use OSF to make educational materials available (e.g., Research Data Management Training; Harvard Map Collection: Research, Teaching, and Learning GIS Collections). And in this year alone, 46 preprints were submitted to OSF preprint servers (e.g., Training TikTok creators in mental health communication benefits their audience, too: An analysis of TikTok user comments), and 37 registrations were created (e.g., Association between environmental factors and firearm violence: a systematic review protocol).
Finally, we are pleased to share the Harvard Open Journals Program (HOJP), which launched earlier this year, has successfully collaborated with MIT Libraries and MIT Press to publish Open Mind, a no-fee open access journal in cognitive science, edited by Edward Gibson, Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT and Samuel Gershman, Professor of Psychology at Harvard. This journal inaugurates the Academic Press Model under HOJP, which provides Harvard editors with seed funding needed to establish and stabilize high-quality, no-fee open access journals published by not-for-profit academic presses. We aim to continue developing the Academic Press Model into a sustainable community-driven framework that can be replicated in other places, and thus, will help scale up the no-fee open access publishing for academics.
HOJP’s second model, the Repository Overlay Model, is in the early stages of development. Under this model, HOJP will provide Harvard editors with infrastructure, services, and guidance to support no-fee open access journals hosted by—or that ‘overlay’—open repositories, including Harvard DASH. Robust yet lightweight, overlay journals differ from traditional academic journals by embedding key components of the publishing process within existing open infrastructure. In this way, HOJP seeks to empower editors in their efforts to transform scholarly publishing in creative and innovative ways.
We welcome the opportunity International Open Access Week presents to reflect on our common aims and pursuits, for it is our unity that serves as a bulwark against inequities among authors, readers, and academic institutions alike. Our shared mission is to fortify and enrich this landscape for all scholars and practitioners to share in the production of knowledge as a public good.