[BOAI] Harvard and APS Reach Accord on Journal Publications

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication.  --Peter 
Suber.]


Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication
Wadsworth House 210
Cambridge, MA 02138
Amy Brand PhD  (617) 495-4089

APS Editorial Office
1 Research Road
Ridge, NY 11961
Amy Halsted (631) 591-4232

HARVARD AND AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY REACH ACCORD ON JOURNAL
PUBLICATIONS

Cambridge, MA & Ridge, NY, April 9, 2009 --The Harvard Office for
Scholarly Communication and the American Physical Society (APS)
announced jointly today that they have entered into an agreement
to facilitate faculty compliance with the University's open
access policies when Harvard faculty members publish in the APS
journals, comprising Physical Review, Physical Review Letters,
and Reviews of Modern Physics.

As a result of the new agreement, APS recognizes Harvard's open
access license and will not require copyright agreement addenda
or waivers, in exchange for Harvard's clarification of its
intended use of the license. In general terms, in exercising its
license under the open access policies, Harvard will not use a
facsimile of the published version without permission of the
publisher, will not charge for the display or distribution of
those articles, and will provide an online link to the
publisher's definitive version of the articles where possible.
The agreement does not restrict fair use of the articles in any
way.

Three of Harvard's ten faculties have passed open access
resolutions within the past 14 months, most recently Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government. The main beneficiaries of the
Harvard-APS agreement will be physics faculty members, who are no
longer obliged to acquire waivers of Harvard's prior license. In
addition, other institutions and their authors may find the
agreement to be a useful model in their interactions with APS and
other scholarly publishers.

According to Professor Bertrand I. Halperin, Hollis Professor of
Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in the Harvard Physics
Department and Chair of the 2008 Publications Oversight Committee
of the American Physical Society, "Harvard's open access
legislation was always consistent in spirit with the aims of the
APS publication policies, but there were differences in detail
that would have required faculty members to request a waiver for
every article published in an APS journal. It is a credit both to
Harvard and to APS that these differences have been worked out.
Since APS journals include, arguably, the most important journals
in the field of physics, the fact that faculty will now be able
to continue publishing in APS journals without seeking a waiver
from Harvard's policies will strengthen both Harvard and the goal
of promoting open access to scholarly publications worldwide."

Joseph Serene, Treasurer/Publisher of the American Physical
Society, agreed with Halperin. "Guided by the APS mission to
advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics," he said, "We have
since 1996 allowed authors to post their APS-published papers on
their own websites, and their manuscripts on arXiv and other
preprint servers, without embargoes or other restrictions.  We
also permit these postings on their employers' websites. Hence we
applaud the spirit of the new Harvard open access policies, which
we recognize as sharing our fundamental goals for scientific
communication, and we are delighted that we and our colleagues at
Harvard have reconciled the differences in our policies, to the
shared benefit of Harvard authors and of the wider scientific
community."

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