The basic idea of Open Access is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers.
Peter Suber, Harvard Library Senior Advisor on Open Access and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project

What Is Open Access?

"Open access" is free unrestricted online access to scientific and scholarly research. There are two primary vehicles for providing open access: open access journals, and open access archives or repositories.

Peter Suber has written a detailed post on this topic called "How to Make Your Own Work Open Access" for the Harvard Open Access Project.

There are 2 primary ways to make your publications open access:

  1. Publish in open access journals. See Preprints & Publishing.
  2. Deposit your publication in an open access repository, such as DASH, the central, open-access institutional repository of research by members of the Harvard community.
    1. Check the journal's copyright policy for self-archiving. Use Jisc's Open Policy Finder.
    2. Identify an appropriate repository available to you, such as DASH.
    3. Deposit your work or have someone deposit it for you.

What Is Open Data?

"Open data" is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike (Open Data Handbook). Open scientific data focuses on the primary research data published within or alongside research papers.

There are many options for publicly sharing data sets as a condition of publication, including government-sponsored repositories, disciplinary repositories, and generalist repositories. Harvard Dataverse is a free generalist data repository open to all researchers at Harvard. 

Review selected data repositories for the biological sciences.

Harvard Open Access Policies

"Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles."

In 2008, Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously to give the Harvard a nonexclusive, irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly articles for any non-commercial purpose. Review all Harvard Open Access Policies.

Author's Advantage

Using this non-exclusive license to your advantage is easy, and Harvard librarians can assist by quickly depositing your papers into DASH.

How the library can help:

  • Allow us to work with you or your Administrative Assistant to identify and deposit your research articles into the DASH online digital repository of Harvard scholarship
  • Call on us to help explain the questions that publishers may have about the Harvard Open Access Policy and compatibility with their contractual demands
  • Invite us to visit your department and introduce the benefits of the Harvard Open Access Policy and how it can streamline the NIH Public Access Policy and NIH grant compliance work-flows
  • Discover how to strengthen your rights as an author by using the Harvard Open Access Policy addendum

Waivers and Opting Out

Some publishers may ask for waivers from authors who are affiliated with institutions where faculty have adopted Open Access Policies such as Harvard.

Due to the flexible structure of the Harvard Open Access policy itself, only one waiver from Harvard is necessary.

Example

If there are 10 Harvard faculty members who have co-authored the manuscript, and the publisher demands to have "opt-out waivers" from the Open Access Policy, remember that only one of the Harvard authors would need to click into the waiver generator, the other 9 Harvard authors do not all need to go through that same exercise. One single waiver releases the paper from the benefits that the Harvard Open Access Policy would have otherwise provided.

  • Harvard Open Access Policy Waiver Request
  • Irrespective of your need for a waiver, the Harvard Library can still work with you to ensure your manuscript reaches the widest possible dissemination, and by observing the embargo period, submitting your manuscript into the Harvard Online Repository DASH, is always an option.

International Open Access Week

International Open Access Week is an opportunity to take action in making openness the default for research — to raise the visibility of scholarship, accelerate research. Explore Open Access Week at Harvard Library.