Harvard, NIH, and the balance of power in the open access debate

This article reviews the recent decision by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences to submit scholarly articles to the University’s institutional repository prior to (or in lieu of) publication in a journal. The remarkable decision, the first of its kind in the United States, reverberated quickly across the open access landscape, making many wonder which universities will follow Harvard’s lead. This article also looks at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy, which as of 8 April 2008, requires NIH-sponsored investigators to place into PubMed a copy of their peer-reviewed journal articles. The impact of this legislation will be enormous, as some 80,000 articles per year result from NIH-sponsored research.