Harvard researchers voting on whether to publish scholarly research free on the Internet

Via the Sloan-c mailing list, here is the lead-in to an article in the 12/2/2008 New York Times by Patricia Cohen:

"Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost. 'In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,' said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. 'It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.'"

Comments

[Dick Moore]

Colleagues interested in publishing on line might want to check out DOI (digital object identifier) technology http://www.doi.org/.

This looks to provide a mechanism that overcomes many of the inherent problems with on line publishing

- Attribution
- IPR
- Coherence
- Persistence

While it may not be the final answer, it is being taken sufficiently seriously for many of the big publication houses to have start using it.

See, for example this article from the New Scientist:

http://technology.newscientist.com/channel/tech/dn13354-smart-rubber-promises-selfmending-products.html

which references an item in Nature thus:

doi:10.1038/nature06669

The ID 10.1038/nature06669, combined with http://dx.doi.org/ to produce http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature06536, resolves straight to the item in Nature.

Dick