[BOAI] Peter Suber to Direct Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication

[Stevan Harnad]

Peter Suber to Direct Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication

*Succeeds Founding Director Stuart Shieber  *

http://library.harvard.edu/peter-suber-direct-harvard
’s-office-scholarly-communication

May 21, 2013—The Harvard Library <http://library.harvard.edu/> and the Berkman
Center for Internet & Society <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/> at Harvard
University are pleased to announce the appointment of Peter Suber as
director of the Office for Scholarly
Communication<http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/> (OSC),
starting July 1, 2013. Suber will continue his current activities as
director of the Harvard Open Access
Project<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/hoap>,
based at the Berkman Center, as well as his affiliations as a Berkman
faculty fellow, senior researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition (SPARC), and research professor of philosophy at
Earlham College.

Suber's new role with the OSC closely aligns with his work leading the
Harvard Open Access Project. Both are driven by a common vision for opening
access to cutting-edge research for everyone who can make use of it.
Integrating the two roles into one position will allow the projects to
better share strategies, staff, resources, and knowledge, and accelerate
the progress of open access both within and beyond Harvard.

“This new phase of collaboration represents a wonderful recognition,
extension, and synchronization of the efforts of the Berkman Center and the
Harvard Library. It promises continued progress inside Harvard as well as
leadership and collaboration outside its increasingly permeable walls,”
said Urs Gasser, Berkman’s executive director.

Suber is taking over executive leadership of the OSC from Stuart Shieber,
Welch Professor of Computer Science in Harvard’s School of Engineering and
Applied Sciences and founding faculty director of the OSC. Shieber will
continue as faculty director, though with a reduced role, co-chairing the
Faculty Advisory Committee to the OSC with Suber, serving in an advisory
capacity to the Office, and working on individual projects with the OSC.
Sue Kriegsman, OSC program manager, will continue to oversee the Office’s
operations and staff, as the activities of the Office continue to expand
and mature.

According to Shieber, “Peter Suber is the world expert on open access; he
literally wrote the book on the topic (*Open Access*, 2012, MIT Press). I
am tremendously excited to get Peter even more involved in the OSC, where
his leadership will foster our position at the forefront of the open-access
revolution.”

University Librarian Robert Darnton noted the importance of the OSC to
Harvard and to the scholarly community more broadly. “Under the leadership
of Stuart Shieber, the OSC has placed Harvard at the forefront of the
open-access movement. Peter Suber is the ideal choice to carry on that
tradition and enhance it,” he said.

The Office for Scholarly Communication spearheads campus-wide initiatives
to open, share, and preserve scholarship. In cooperation with the OSC,
faculty at eight of Harvard’s schools have put in place default
rights-retention open-access policies, which have influenced similar
policies at universities throughout the world. The Digital Access to
Scholarship at Harvard <http://dash.harvard.edu/> (DASH) repository
established and operated by the OSC holds more than 12,000 scholarly
articles, which have been downloaded almost 1.5 million times from every
continent, some 3,000 downloads per day. The Library
Lab<http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/liblab> program,
funded by the Arcadia Fund <http://www.arcadiafund.org.uk/> and managed by
the OSC, has supported dozens of entrepreneurial grants within the Harvard
Library system to solve problems and improve services.

The Arcadia-funded Harvard Open Access Project is housed at the Berkman
Center for Internet & Society and works with the OSC to foster open access
within Harvard. At the same time, it looks outward to promote open access
beyond Harvard. It currently consults *pro bono* with more than 40
universities, foundations, publishers, and government agencies on their
open-access policies. It maintains a widely-endorsed guide to good
practices<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/8005> for
university open-access policies, and a series of reference pages on topics
such as federal open-access legislation, business models for open-access
journals and books, and scholarly societies publishing open-access
journals. HOAP also runs the Open Access Tracking Project, a comprehensive
source of real-time news and comment on worldwide open-access developments.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/boai-forum/attachments/20130523/e312131f/attachment.html