The Issue: Harvard professors now able to publish online
What We Think: Time to jump on open access bandwagon

Professors live in ivory towers, pounding away on typewriters, submitting esoteric studies to obscure publications that collect dust in the basements of small university libraries. At least this was the image ascribed to university instructors before a decision was made by Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Tuesday evening that may change that for good.

This vote allows professors in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences to freely publish their own work in an open-access repository, run by the university library system, which can be accessed online. These articles will be made free to a worldwide audience, a step that firmly breaks with the traditional style of scholarly publication.

Professors feel great pressure to publish regularly in order to maintain reputations or gain tenure. This process is by no means easy. Those interested first have to research and write scholarly articles; then, the professor has to seek a willing publisher - generally an obscure scholarly journal with restricted distribution and readership. These journals have a small, select audience, and therefore, very high subscription fees. Essentially, scholarly publication is a lesson in preaching to the choir, with professors writing on very difficult subjects for the pleasure of other professors.

We applaud this initiative, for we believe that it will allow for a greater readership among both university faculty and interested students. Furthermore, maintaining the online repository will allow these works to be read and studied by foreign universities interested in the findings of American professors.

This method of publication also makes the process much easier for beleaguered professors and may even encourage them to publish more often.

Despite all of the benefits, though, we strongly discourage this scholarly archive from becoming another Wikipedia page. The benefit of the current publication process is that the quality of the research is ensured through peer review and the rigorous standards imposed by the journals themselves. It is very important that this expected quality not be sacrificed for the ease and availability of this new publication option.

Although Tuesday's decision only applies to the Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty, we encourage Boston College to pursue a similar option for its professors. As the success of initiatives like MIT OpenCourseWare, Wikipedia, JStor, and Flickr show, open access is the wave of the future. BC needs to hop on the bandwagon.

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