[BOAI] BioMed Central Cites Harvard as an Open-Access Institution of the Year

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from Harvard University.  --Peter Suber.]

BioMed Central (BMC), an international publisher of journals in science,
technology, and medicine and a pioneer in open-access publishing, named
Harvard University one of the world's three open-access institutions of the
year. *BioMed Central* <http://www.biomedcentral.com/> announced the honor
at its *fourth annual research
awards*<http://www.biomedcentral.com/researchawards/winners/#open_access_inst>
 ceremony in London on June 9.

The annual award recognizes institutions that have done the most to show
leadership in taking steps to expand access to the published results of
scholarly research. This year, to reflect the global spread of open-access
initiatives, BMC chose to honor Harvard together with the *University of
Zurich* <http://www.uzh.ch/> and the *Chinese Academy of
Sciences*<http://english.cas.cn/>
.

The award to Harvard recognizes the breadth and significance of Harvard's
open-access policies: "The open-access mandate introduced by Harvard's
Faculty of Arts and Sciences has been extremely influential, encouraging and
emboldening other US institutions including MIT, Kansas and Duke University
to take similar action. In addition, a furthehulr four schools at Harvard
have since gone on to introduce their own mandates. (Harvard Graduate School
of Education, Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School and the Harvard
Kennedy School of Government)."

In addition, BioMed Central lauds the University as "it emphasizes the need
to find sustainable alternatives to subscriptions in order cover the costs
associated with peer-reviewed publication, while avoiding the need to
restrict access."

Stuart M. Shieber, author of the FAS open-access policy and director of the
Office for Scholarly Communication, describes the award as both gratifying
and significant. "In global terms, Harvard has a leadership role in open
access," notes Shieber, who is also Harvard's James O. Welch, Jr. and
Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering
and Applied Sciences. "Like our colleagues at Zurich and at the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, we have accomplished a great deal, but must continue to
work on many fronts: support for open-access journals, difficult issues in
monograph and book publishing in the humanities, access to scientific data,
tools for supporting open access, new kinds of scholarly output such as
databases and software."

Following the unanimous FAS vote for open access in 2008, Provost Steven E.
Hyman charged the University Library to create the* Office for Scholarly
Communication *as an integral part of Harvard's central library
services.<http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/>

"In recognizing Harvard as one of three globally significant open-access
institutes," states Helen Shenton, Deputy Director of the* H**arvard
University Library* <http://hul.harvard.edu/>, "BioMed Central celebrates
the leadership and support of Harvard's faculty, while affirming the value
of the University's investments in scholarly communication. The award also
underscores the growing role of the Harvard Libraries in gathering,
curating, and delivering up-to-date research online through our growing
open-access repository."


-- *
*

*Peter Kosewski*

Director, Publications and Communications

Harvard University Library

Wadsworth House -- 1341 Mass. Avenue

Cambridge, MA  02138

T   617.495.7793

F   617.495.0370

http://hul.harvard.edu
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