Harvard Faculty Agrees To Free Up Its Research
from the about-time dept
While MIT has received plenty of attention over the years for its effort to free up all course materials a potentially equally as interesting move happened at Harvard yesterday, where Arts & Sciences faculty agreed to free up their research. For many years, there's been a push by some to change the process for publishing research. Typically, academic research would appear in journals that were incredibly expensive, potentially limiting the access to that research, even if the research was publicly funded. However, what this group of Harvard faculty have now done is agree that any research they publish will also be available for free online. As mentioned recently, in an age where everyone is so focused on intellectual property, it suddenly makes things like teaching and learning appear to be mighty similar to what others call theft or infringement. It's nice to see some universities starting to push back on that.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Friendlier Harvard
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Increases spam
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Increases spam
One the whole, I think this is great. Getting a hold of quality research or course material (for whatever purposes) can be expensive, and needlessly difficult sometimes. Opening things up (like ocw.mit.edu has begun to do) should help people get information they're looking for. After all, most academic research won't really help or hurt the "average" person any (it's usually pretty specific, narrow and technical, which makes it hard sometimes to get any practical usage out of it), so making it available for those who really do have an interest in the topics would be highly beneficial, speaking as a current grad student.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Good Start for the non e-Enabled...
However, it's not where the real cost savings are. I think that would be in the textbook arena- where once a book is published, and proceeds through the required approvals at the educational facility, the content and research within the textbook could be up to 5 years old.
However, this accelerated enhancement of productivity helps the school and professors to adapt and understand the power of mass collaboration and hopefully, as a customer, pursuade the textbook publishers to consider this new model
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Increases spam
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Increases spam
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Increases spam
[ link to this | view in thread ]
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in thread ]