1. An Open-Access Policy for Harvard Medical School (October 23, 2014)

Harvard Medical School adopted an open-access policy on June 18, 2014, by a unanimous vote of the Faculty Council. The new policy covers both “quad”-based and clinical faculty. As a result, all Harvard schools now have open-access policies. Like the other Harvard policies, the Medical School policy insures that faculty members automatically retain a license to share their research papers freely through DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), the University’s open-access repository. Faculty also have the option to waive this license for any article, preserving their freedom to submit new work to the journals of their choice. (Read more.)

2. Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Recommends Open-Access Deposit for Faculty Review Process (October 22, 2014)

Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) announced a pilot project recommending to faculty engaged in a review, promotion, or tenure process to use Harvard’s open-access repository DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) as part of their preparations. SEAS is part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which unanimously adopted an open-access policy in 2008, asking faculty to deposit their new scholarly articles in DASH. SEAS strongly supports this policy and sees this program as one more incentive to help implement the policy. (Read more.)

3. Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society Adopts an Open-Access Policy (October 22, 2014)

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society announced that the Center’s faculty directors and staff have adopted an open-access policy. In a landmark unanimous vote, the Berkman Center became the first research center at Harvard to adopt an open-access policy, and the first to extend the scope of Harvard’s open-access policies beyond the faculty. (Read more.)

4. Harvard Library Lifts Restrictions on Digital Reproductions of Works in the Public Domain (October 21, 2014)

The Harvard Library announced a new policy on the use of digital reproductions of works in the public domain. When the Library makes such reproductions and makes them openly available online, it will treat the reproductions themselves as objects in the public domain and will not try to restrict what users can do with them. For additional detail, see the policy FAQ. (Read more.)

5. Peerless Preservation for Harvard’s Open-Access Repository (October 20, 2014)

The Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication andHarvard University Archives announced two initiatives to preserve Harvard’s open-access research in the Library’s state-of-the-art digital preservation system, Digital Repository Services (DRS). One initiative will cover electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) and one will cover the scholarly articles inDASH, Harvard’s open-access repository. (