The library where I work has decided to think long and hard about its digital repository strategy. Your library may be doing this too, or may have recently done so and is now working on carrying out that strategy. If it’s not, it probably should be.

Libraries have for a long time hosted repositories of content in paper form; indeed, such repositories account for a large portion of both the budget and the floor space of many libraries. But many of them have been slow to take on responsibility for digital repositories, or have only done so in a very limited way, compared to their physical repository investments.

But while established libraries have often hesitated in taking up digital repositories, the rest of the world has not. As folks in research libraries have known for a while, a lot of the money we now spend on content pays for electronic resources held in publisher repositories. In typical arrangements, libraries no longer own this content (as they owned the print content the electronic versions supplant) but lease it. And even if a library has a “perpetual access” contract that lets it download publisher content after ending a subscription, for practical purposes many libraries are not ready to host it or make it available as readily and seamlessly as their patrons have grown to expect.

However, even if publisher repositories, or scholar-run discipline repositories like the social scientists’ SSRN, aren’t directly run by traditional libraries, those libraries are among their primary customers. Therefore, the folks who run those repositories have incentives to provide the kinds of services that those libraries need to carry our their missions (at least, if the libraries know to ask for them).

Increasingly, though, people are using new kinds of repositories that have little or no connection to traditional libraries. Some of these repositories are on their users’ own computers– their digital music collection and photo library, managed by programs like ITunes, IPhoto, and Picasa. Some of these repositories are on Internet sites like YouTube, Flickr, Google Docs and Google Base, and the various WikiMedia sites. We often don’t think of all of these as “repositories”, but that’s how people are using them: to manage and provide access to information in a stable way, potentially over a long period of time.

I’m not using “repository” here to mean just “glorified filesystem or website”. The everyday repositories I mention above typically put substantial effort into managing metadata, supporting discovery, providing for access control (and often backup and version control), and supporting long-term access and use of the content. They tend to do all these things much more quietly and unobtrusively than the repositories typically designed for and marketed to libraries, but that’s a feature, not a bug. We who work in research libraries need to consider these “repositories for everybody” very carefully. A lot of the digital content that libraries will want to include in our own collections will come out of those repositories. And those repositories can potentially teach us a lot about how to design and run our own.

That’s one big reason why I want to discuss my library’s strategic thinking about repositories in open forums like this one. True, the Penn Libraries don’t have exactly the same uses and needs for repositories as other people and groups. But I think there are a lot of repository issues where we and many others share common interests, or have common questions we all need to answer. Over a series of posts, I hope to discuss repository purposes, infrastructure, technologies, ingest, workflow, labor allocation, lifecycles, legal concerns, integration, policy, and community, all of which are relevant to our repository plans. The strategies and issues most salient for Penn may or may not be the same as yours. But if repositories matter to you, I hope that discussing our issues in a broader context will give you useful things to think about for your own situation. And I hope that we will learn from you as well.

Lots of other people have already written thoughtfully on repositories. I hope to stealreuse and build on their ideas wherever I can. A good introduction to many of the issues can be found at JISC’s Repository Support Project, a website to help institutions planning repositories, starting from “What is a repository, anyway?” and working from there. (It’s not a given, by the way, that libraries should always run their own repositories for their digital content– but more on that later.)

Repository planners should be familiar with both the theory and practice of repositories. You don’t have to know all the details of the OAIS reference model, for instance, but it’s helpful to know the general principles it sets out, both for issues to think about in running a repository over a long term, and for a conceptual vocabulary for understanding and interacting with other repository initiatives. Likewise it helps to at least be conversant with standard metadata schemas, protocols, recommended procedures, and the like. But you also very much need to know how repositories are working, or not working, in practice. The JISC site I mentioned earlier has an interesting case studies section, where folks who have run repositories describe their experiences, and how they may have differed from expectations. Some repository managers also run blogs where they talk about their day-to-day experiences with repositories, good and bad. Les Carr’s RepositoryMan and Dorothea Salo’s Caveat Lector are two blogs that I find must-reads, for keeping track of new developments repository maintainers can use and practical problems that repository planners can’t afford to ignore.

Future installments in this series will be posted under the “repositories” category. In the meantime, if you’re interested in these issues, I recommend you check out the resources above. And I’d be very interested in hearing about particular issues that should be discussed here.

Many online publishers, particularly those that have been around for a while, now have large quantities of material that is in the public domain. The reasons vary: Some material was produced by US government agencies, such as NASA. Some material was published before 1923, too long ago be copyrighted in the US. There’s also a fair bit of later material that’s public domain due to lack of maintenance of the copyright. For instance, US-originating copyrights before 1964 had to be renewed with the Copyright Office, or they would expire after 28 years.

Some publishers are reluctant not only to provide this material openly, but even to acknowledge its public domain status. So it’s refreshing to see some of them starting to do so, even when the public domain status is not obvious.

This morning, for instance, I was happy to see, via Alex Golub and Open Access News, that the American Anthropological Association openly acknowledges on its permissions page that “AAA article content published before 1964 is in the public domain and may be used and copied without permission.” The reason for this appears to be non-renewal. As is the case for most periodicals (see a 2006 presentation of mine on this point), the AAA’s flagship journal, American Anthropologist, had no copyright renewals, a fact which I’ve now recorded in my inventory of periodicals renewals. I suspect that the AAA was generally not renewing copyrights for any of its publications at the time, and that its acknowledgement above reflects this.

The AAA does ask (politely, not as a legal demand) for acknowledgement and backlinks to their AnthroSource archive in web reproductions of public domain articles. But they’re otherwise happy to allow people to copy them.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the articles are easy to copy. The AAA relies on JSTOR for providing its older issues online. JSTOR has the American Anthropologist back-run going to the very first issues in 1888, but it won’t actually give me access to the articles in the public domain issues unless I use my institution’s subscription. (And even then, JSTOR’s standard terms and conditions, which institutions normally agree to when they subscribe, prohibit downloading and redistributing full issues, whether or not they’re copyrighted.) It would be nice if JSTOR’s policies were liberalized for their public domain content, but at least AAA has acknowledged that their articles can be reproduced once obtained by legitimate means.

Some other institutions appear to be liberalizing their policies for access as well. Yesterday, I heard Michael Edson of the Smithsonian talk at the Digital Library Federation spring forum (where I am now), where he mentioned that the Smithsonian was planning to put many of its digital resources onto image sharing sites under open access arrangements such as Creative Commons licenses, so folks could openly reuse, repurpose, and enrich them. This will be a welcome change from the policies of many Smithsonian units, whose terms of use sometimes prohibit use of their public online images even on a personal web page, without permission, “even in the absence of copyright”.

This policy change was not necessarily natural or inevitable. I suspect the challenge from Public.Resource.org last year, where they cited a Yale law prof calling the Smithsonian’s rights claims “nonsense on stilts” and downloaded thousands of their images anyway, may have had something to do with it. And the Smithsonian is sufficiently large and decentralized — Michael in his talk said they had at least 150 different web teams among their 12,000 staff and volunteer workers — that they may continue to have a range of open access policies in their various units.

So while American Anthropologist and the Smithsonian images are not yet as fully openly accessible as they could be, their publishers are making significant moves in the right direction. We can help them and other publishers keep moving in that direction, by asserting the rights of the public, and by crediting publishers when they acknowledge them.

UPDATE (2 pm): After looking around the Web some, I’ve found 6 years worth of American Anthropologist freely available online, all from before 1923, scanned by mass digitization projects. I’ll add this collection to The Online Books Page listings tonight, and would be very interested in hearing of more volumes I can add. The mass digitization projects have usually stopped at 1922, but as we see above, public domain digitizers don’t have to.

The new draft of the ILS-Discovery recommendations I mentioned in my last post is now out. You can download it, and read more about it, on our task force wiki.

As I mentioned previously, we intend this draft to be the last release before the official final version. We don’t expect to change the basic recommended functions in major ways in the final draft, though there’s a lot more that can be said and done to promote interoperability beyond these first steps we’ve taken.

We are very interested in correcting and clarifying anything that is erroneous, ambiguous, or unclear, particularly in the Level 1 functionality we recommend. Comments can be emailed to me (”ockerblo” at “pobox.upenn.edu”) between now and Friday, May 9; I’ll pass them along to the task force working on this. We hope to do our final revisions and then release the official recommendation not long afterwards.

The task force will also be conducting a birds-of-a-feather discussion session at next week’s DLF Spring Forum in Minneapolis. The session will be held at 2:30 on Tuesday, April 29, in Greenway B on the second floor of the conference hotel. Topics of discussion include the Berkeley accord (the agreement with vendors and developers that informed this draft), the draft recommendation and its upcoming finalization, implementing the recommendation, and how to continue and build on efforts to promote and standardize interoperation between the ILS and discovery applications.

I’m still working on an example implementation of the Level 1 functions, but have been busy enough with the draft not to finish it yet (or blog about much else lately; there are some other topics in the pipeline, though!) I hope to point to that soon. And if you’re interested in our recommendation or what it’s trying to accomplish, I hope to hear from you. And maybe I’ll see you in Minneapolis next week.

As Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, announced last week, we have an agreement with many of the developers and vendors of integrated library systems and discovery applications to support a basic set of functions to allow ILS’s and discovery applications to interoperate. (I’ve written about this effort previously here and here.)

This basic set is a subset (what we’re calling “Basic Discovery Interfaces” or “level 1″) of the full set of functions we will be recommending, and we still have to specify some of the details about how the Level 1 functions will be invoked by discovery applications. But it’s a very important first step. The functions it includes should enable an interesting array of discovery applications to work with a variety of ILS’s. And I hope that our work will result in some useful implementations soon, and help encourage further interoperability and standards to develop, based on our recommendations.

The functions, in summary, are

• Harvesting bibliographic and, when requested, expanded records from an ILS, in full or incrementally. (Expanded records also include information on holdings, availability, and other data relevant to discovery not in the bibliographic record proper.) This allows independent search indexes to be made for a library’s cataloged content. The recommended technology (or “binding”) will involve OAI-PMH. (Someone asked whether this would just export Dublin Core, the only metadata format OAI-PMH requires. Our answer: it’s supposed to include, at minimum, all the data in the bibliographic record that’s relevant for discovery. So for an ILS with MARC records, for instance, simple unqualified Dublin Core would not suffice, but MARC-XML records using a suitable XML schema like marc21 could.) [Editor note: this paragraph was changed 17 April, after re-reading Peter's announcement]
• Querying for availability of items in real time. This allows users to see if they can obtain information they’ve discovered in the library’s collection. Our recommended binding will involve a simple REST interface, with a URL request and a simple, expandable XML reply. (There are other ways of querying availability, including through NCIP, but given how difficult it’s been to get full implementations of NCIP, we want to make the basic required functionality as simple as possible. There’s been some discussion of what would be desirable on the ILS-DI Google group, which is open to the public.)
• Linking back to any item in the OPAC, in a stable way, so that users can make requests on the item using the native OPAC/ILS interface interface if desired. We plan to allow ILS’s to declare a URL template, which would include the appropriate bibliographic or item identifier from the harvested records, for links back to the item. (Someone asked whether an OpenURL should be used here. It could be used, and we’d love to see an OpenURL-based suggested template. The basic functionality required here, however, doesn’t need the sophisticated features of the OpenURL, so while OpenURLs could well be a particularly useful way to formulate both this simple linkback and more sophisticated, detailed OPAC linkback requests, we don’t plan to require OpenURL at Level 1.)

We’ll be releasing a new draft with more detail on the Level 1 functions within the next week, in time for people to read it before the next DLF Forum in Minneapolis, where we’ll be having a Birds of a Feather session to talk about implementing and building on our recommendations. I’m also hoping to have a sample implementation of the Level 1 functions very soon for The Online Books Page, and have implemented some of the functions already. (The OBP is not an ILS, but like an ILS, it manages bibliographic records and mediates access to texts; and the functions we specify in Level 1 can also be useful for interoperating with the Online Books Page collection.) I hope to see other implementations for ILS’s and other systems before long.

We’re hoping that this pre-Forum draft release can be the last full release before the official recommendation is released later this spring, to give folks the opportunity to point out any errors, ambiguities, or confusing aspects of what we recommend and specify. We hope to make any necessary corrections in short order, release the final recommendation, and then go sit on the beach and drink tequilas implement these functions, build cool new discovery applications, and help develop a community for using ILS data and services in productive and innovative ways.

I’m excited about what lies ahead, and if you are as well, I hope you’ll be a part of that community.

For years, there’s been an uneasy truce between publishers and universities about the inclusion of copyrighted materials in universities’ online course web sites and “courseware” systems. Publishers and universities have been arguing for years over when posting such materials for courses is fair use, and when it requires permission and payment. While legal threats have sometimes been made or implied, involving universities like Cornell and UCSD (see this Library Journal article from October for background), the parties involved have tended eventually to either climb down or settle. (Cornell, for instance, negotiated an agreement with publishers in 2006.)

That general truce broke down this week, though. Three major academic publishers, with the backing of the Association of American Publishers, have sued Georgia State University officials over GSU’s postings of parts of their publications in their campus Blackboard and WebCT courseware systems. The plaintiffs contend that the posting of full chapters and lengthy excerpts in GSU’s courseware system is copyright infringement, not fair use, particularly when the Copyright Clearance Center offers licenses for many of those readings. I have not yet found a response from GSU.

At the same time, there’s been an increasing movement for university scholars, the authors of many of these course readings, to make their works freely available online, open for reading and reuse. Open Access News has recently posted summaries of recent open access mandates from bodies like NIH and Harvard, and of open textbook initiatives. The open courseware movement, where professors freely share their own course materials with the world, is also gaining steam, with many universities now offering open courseware sites, and a conference being held in China later this month to further extend the scope and reach of free course materials.

These two trends, combined, could lead to some interesting outcomes. If schools, for whatever reason, want to eliminate or minimize payment and permission requirements for course materials, and a growing body of literature potentially useful for course materials is openly available, then we can expect to see schools move towards building coursepacks made entirely, or mostly, of open access materials. They are therefore motivated to find, and build, systems for easily compiling such coursepacks.

Right now, it can be difficult to find suitable open access readings for a class you’re planning on teaching. Tools like OCWFinder help, but they’re more geared towards finding specific existing courses with open access materials (which might be no more than a syllabus and a few assignments in some cases) than finding specific open access readings that might be suitable for a planned course.

But in a world that’s brought us global content sharing systems like Flickr, CiteULike, and PubMedCentral, it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine systems that would let instructors provide and share open access course readings more readily. A well-designed, browsable and searchable repository of such readings could provide a convenient way for professors to upload, organize, and disseminate open coursepacks for their students (”Just go to the OpenCoursePacks website, and type in the name of my course”, they could say). The same site could also let profs could tag, annotate, and recommend their readings, thereby making it that much easier for other professors to find and include suitable open access content in their own coursepacks. With a good design, and suitable scale and interest, a coursepack sharing site could make a lot more good instructional material widely and freely used and shared.

Will that happen? I don’t know. But it’s an intriguing idea, I think, and perhaps someone could run with it, or something like it. Perhaps someone already is.

The best library collections don’t do much good if people who may be interested in the content don’t find it. That’s why it’s so important to provide good discovery tools for your collection. But even if you do that, lots of folks are going to find your content not through your own discovery interfaces, but through links from the outside. A large proportion of the visits to our institutional repository don’t come through the front door, but from Google and other search engines indexing papers in the repository.

There’s a whole industry set up around search engine optimization, by means both fair and foul. The basics are pretty simple, though: make it easy for search engines to find content that you want indexed, and make it easy for interested people to link to your content. (Not only will people follow those links, but search engines will typically favor content with more links to it.)

Seems pretty simple, but there are still lots of sites in the digital library world that don’t have clear persistent URLs for their content, that use Javascript, Flash and other extras for navigation that crawlers (and many users) can’t follow, require traversing too many links to get to important content, or that only make their content findable via searching (which crawlers won’t do) and not via browsing.

A new article in D-Lib, “Site Design Impact on Robots: An Examination of Search Engine Crawler Behavior at Deep and Wide Websites”, gives some empirical support to some of the common-sense tips for getting sites indexed. Not surprisingly, they find that “wide” websites (those that make their content reachable through a relatively small number of clicks) are more readily indexed than “deep” websites (those that require a large number of clicks to get to some of their content). They also report that Google crawled their sites much more thoroughly than MSN and Yahoo (one reason, I’m sure, why folks doing obscure searches tend to prefer it). I was a bit surprised, though, to find that their .com sites were crawled more quickly than the same sites in a .edu domain. (The authors speculate that advertising revenue considerations may have something to do with this.)

One kind of useful page that the authors don’t mention is a “new content” page, which I’ve found helps get my Online Books Page indexed very quickly. Based on cache dates I’ve seen in search results, Google seems to check my new books page every day or two, and crawls the new links it finds there. Since every book I list appears there at one time or another, this provides very thorough indexing for virtually the entire site.

I suspect that Google and other crawlers pay special attention to pages like these, particularly if they’re updated frequently. This might also explain why blogs tend to get particularly highly ranked in Google and other engines compared to other sites, since they also are frequently updated, and show all their new content prominently, in reverse-chronological order.

You can find many other useful tips for getting indexed and linked in Cory Doctorow’s article “17 Tips for Getting Bloggers to Write About You“. The title may sound off-topic, but the article is mostly about making your content easy to link to. Most of the tips also work for making your content easy to index.

The more links there are to your content from other interesting places, and the more your content gets indexed by search engines, the more interested readers will find and use your content when you put it online. Making your content link-friendly and crawler-friendly, then, can help your library serve lots of new readers.

Okay, it’s a trend:

• Feb. 9: Tor books launches their “Watch the Skies” program, where they send out free ebooks once a week to readers who register on their site. These are best-selling and critically acclaimed books like John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and Robert Charles Wilson’s Hugo-winning Spin. By the end of the month, Scalzi reports increased sales of a number of his titles after his book is offered free.
• Feb. 13: Suze Orman announces free download on Oprah of one of her recent financial advice books for a limited time. Over a million copies are downloaded in the 33 hours it’s available; sales are strong both during and after the offer. (Indeed, as I write this, Amazon reports it at #1 in the personal finance category.)
• Feb. 27: Random House announces that Charles Bock’s novel Beautiful Children will be available for free download through the 29th. The book has reportedly just entered the New York Times bestseller list.
• Feb. 28: Neil Gaiman announces that his novel American Gods, a critically acclaimed bestseller from 2001, will be freely readable online at HarperCollins’ “Browse Inside” site for a month. HarperCollins had announced earlier in the month that they would make selected titles available online in full at their site for free (though their actual site emphasizes sampling rather than reading the books all the way through). Harper would track usage of the site to evaluate its effect on sales.

The news here isn’t so much that are people are putting their books online for free. Some folks have been doing that for years, and I’ve been listing recent permanent, no-strings-attached free online books on The Online Books Page since the 1990s. (See, for instance, Daniel Solove’s The Future of Reputation, a current book posted last week, or Baen Books’ long-running free library.) What’s new is the number of large trade publishers who have almost simultaneously decided to try offering complete, free, in-print books online for the first time, with the expectation that this could well improve sales. The “limited time” offers let them be careful about it to start with, metaphorically dipping their toes in the water before diving in. They can also potentially compare the effects of short-term free ebook offers to either no free ebook offers or permanent free ebook offers. If the experiments work out well, this may be the first of a lot more current literature that becomes available online for free.

(Or it could just be this year’s publishing fad, forgotten or laughed about by next year. We’ll see, but some of the early reports above sound promising.)

I’ve read and enjoyed a number of the books that I mention above. I’m not listing them on The Online Books Page at present; that site is really designed for permanent titles rather than books that are here today and gone tomorrow. (Though many libraries have “current bestsellers” sections that work that way, using rental programs like McNaughton.) I do find number of these book offers worth noting somewhere. I don’t necessarily want to devote a full post to each one I hear about, though.

So I’ve introduced a new feature to this site that can hold quick links to temporarily-free ebook offers I find of interest, as well as links to other news and stories that are interesting and relevant enough to mention here, but not in a full post. You can find these links in the right column, under the heading “Everybody’s Library Tags”. (I’m using PennTags, our local social tagging system, to collect and manage these links.) The Tags feature has its own RSS feed separate from that of the blog, in case you’d like to put it in your aggregator. If you’d like to limit the feed to just the free books tags, and not the other links I post there, use this feed URL instead.

I haven’t tried this feature before (though I’ve seen it used to good effect on other blogs), and I’m not positive at this point whether I’ll keep it up. (If I find it too hard to keep reasonably current stuff in there, I’ll just discontinue it.) But, as the publishers above are doing with their free book offers, I’ll try it out, and see what happens.

For a few years in the early 1900s, some American book publishers came up with a brave new marketing paradigm. Instead of offering books for sale the old-fashioned way, they essentially decided to license them. Purchasers were warned of dire legal consequences if they didn’t go along with the licenses attached to the books. If, for instance, you bought Kate Meredith, Financier, published in 1906, you would be greeted by this text on the first page:

“This copyright volume is offered for sale to the public only through the authorized agents of the publishers, who are permitted to sell it only at retail and at fifty cents per copy, and with the express condition and reservation that it shall not, prior to August 1st, 1907, be resold, or offered or advertised for resale. The purchaser from them agrees to this condition and reservation by the acceptance of this copy. In case of any breach thereof, the title to this book immediately reverts to the publishers. Any defacement, alteration or removal of this notice will be prosecuted by the publishers to the full extent of of the law.”

THE AUTHORS AND NEWSPAPERS ASSOCIATION

It wasn’t just done with books, either. Here’s a similar license from a 1907 Edison cylinder record.

In 1908, however, the Supreme Court would put an end to these kinds of licenses, in Bobbs-Merrill vs. Straus. That case helped establish the first sale doctrine, which basically says that a buyer of a book really does own it, and has the right to keep it, share it, lend it, resell it, give it away, or otherwise dispose of it as they see fit, just like they can with other things they buy. Congress would eventually codify this doctrine, with various qualifications, in the copyright statutes; it’s now section 109 of the copyright code.

So thanks to the courts and Congress of a century ago, you can pick up a book in a bookstore and buy it with confidence. You don’t have to carefully look it over in the store or show it to an expert to figure out what you’re allowed to do with it when you’re through reading it yourself.

At least, you don’t if it’s a print book. When you buy pay for an ebook from the bookstores for the best-known current “reading devices”, however, it’s a different story.

Punch was a British institution for well over a century. Founded in 1841, it was an irreverent weekly magazine of quips, cartoons, essays, stories and poetry, often on the politics and events of the day. Writers and artists like W. M. Thackeray, A. A. Milne, P. G. Wodehouse, Kingsley Amis, Arthur Rackham, and Ernest Shepard contributed to it. Punch folded in 1992, with its best days long past, but in its heyday it enjoyed great popular and critical acclaim. If the Daily Show writers had lived in 19th century London instead of 21st century America, they might have created something like it.

Reading it now can be a bit disorienting, partly because the writers often assume the readers are already very familiar with the contemporary headlines and goings on, and partly because the sense of what’s funny is so mercurial. What makes an 1860s London reader of Punch break out into uncontrollable laughter may be very different from what has the same effect on an 2008 Xkcd fan.

But all sorts of folks still find it of interest, whether they’re researching English history and culture, looking for long out of print literature and drawings from writers and artists they fancy, or just wanting a good read. The first 80 years or so of issues are now in the public domain. Project Gutenberg started transcribing them (including the cartoons) a few years back. Now the mass digitizers have gotten involved too, and in response to a reader’s request I’ve found and organized online copies of most of the issues up to 1922. (After that point, copyright issues get sticky.)

Here’s my listing. Enjoy. (And do tell me if you find any issues I couldn’t.)

The Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty recently approved a resolution giving the University permission to make their scholarly articles available to the world at no charge. Here’s the official press release from Harvard, and here’s the text of the resolution, as given in the official faculty council agenda. (The resolution text is on the second page. It could have been amended before the vote, but I haven’t heard of any amendments.)

This is the first university-level open access mandate in the US, from the most prominent university in the US, and as many have noted, this is a huge step forward for open access to research. There are two aspects to the mandate: the familiar aspect directs faculty to supply Harvard copies of their papers to post; the more novel aspect stipulates that Harvard automatically get the rights to post their faculty papers for free. Harvard allows faculty members to exempt papers from these requirements, but it must be done in writing, with reason, separately for each paper that a faculty member wants to exempt.

I find this approach ingenious. As people maintaining institutional repositories have come to know, there are two main barriers to distributing one’s faculty’s work in one’s repository: getting hold of the work, and getting the right to publish the work. The first of these can be handled in various ways; whether the faculty, the departmental administrators, or the librarians get the content to the right place, it’s all purely a matter of local negotiation. But that’s not the case with rights. By the time we repository maintainers get content from authors, the authors have often signed their rights away to the journals that published the papers. The publishers have effectively called dibs on redistribution rights, and we can’t distribute unless they agree to it. A faculty member that may want to have us distribute her work too may no longer have the power to let us– she’s already signed that right away to someone else.

By requiring (non-exclusive) rights to free, open access distribution to any new paper created under its employ, Harvard is effectively calling dibs before the publishers can. So if I’m running a repository at Harvard (or another institution with a similar policy), copyright clearance becomes much easier. I don’t have to look up and carefully parse a journal’s self-archiving policy, try negotiating with publishers, or verify that I have the permitted version of a paper to archive and the proper embargo period. As long as the paper is dated after the mandate went into place, and the paper’s not on my institution’s exception list, I can just grab and go. Or, I can accept my faculty’s and department’s self-deposits without having to go back and forth with them about whether they have the right permissions and are following the right procedures for that publisher. Publishers may want their authors to sign away the rights that they’ve given us, but they can’t, at least not without going out of their way to do so, because we already have those rights. And as Dorothea Salo points out, there are disincentives for both publishers and faculty to rock the boat here. Under this arrangement, the norms have changed– from restricted access as a default, with the onus for exceptions placed on the library or the scholar, to open access as a default, with the onus for exceptions placed on the publisher or the scholar.

Some open access advocates have argued that one could design a mandate that was even more open-access-friendly. That may be, but to judge this mandate a failure (as the linked post above appears to at one point) seems to me an example of the “perfect” being the enemy of the good. This mandate is faculty-friendly as well as being open-access friendly, in that it minimizes the extra work faculty have to do and assures them the last word in access control, should they decide to exercise it. And that, I believe, is crucial to its having been adopted at all, and to its subsequent acceptance by faculty. (Remember, this is the first open access mandate that a US university faculty, let alone one with the clout of Harvard, has adopted on its own.)

In the future, perhaps universities will adopt even more effective policies to share their research output with the world. Right now, though, I’d say this is a big step forward, and one that I hope that my university and many others will consider emulating.