Harvard Law giving away research

Harvard Law School will become the first U.S. law school to distribute professors’ scholarly articles over the Internet for free, following a similar move by the university’s arts and science faculty three months ago.
The 92-member law faculty, in Cambridge, voted earlier this month to post articles in an online repository that will be searchable by other Internet services, according to a statement last week. Educators at other schools can freely provide the articles to students if the material isn’t used for profit.
The vote advances the movement to make scholarship more widely available to individuals and institutions that sometimes pay thousands of dollars a year for a single academic journal subscription. Harvard Law’s move also may challenge legal databases that collect law journal articles, such as Thomson Reuters Plc’s Westlaw and Reed Elsevier Plc’s Lexis-Nexis, said John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor who pushed for the motion.
“The economics of publishing, both in the scholarly field and in the trade press, is changing very quickly in the digital era,” said Palfrey, who also is vice dean of library and information resources.
The unanimous decision followed a Feb. 13 vote by Harvard’s arts and sciences professors, the largest faculty at the university. Both policies encourage professors to post articles on a Harvard Web site, and allow professors who want to restrict publication to an academic journal to keep articles off the site.
“Our decision to embrace ‘open access’ means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the law school,” said Law School Dean Elena Kagan.
Harvard Law’s faculty members probably produce a few hundred articles a year, Palfrey said. The articles, like those from other faculties, are typically published in journals affiliated with a law school, many of which are student-run and receive some financial support from the institution, he said. &#8226