Celebrating Open Access Week 2024 | Harvard Library

"This year, we are celebrating International Open Access Week and the reprised theme of Community over Commercialization. The principle of being driven first and foremost by community needs and values is foundational to our work at Harvard Library. And it is ever-present in the way we do this work: by forming strong partnerships across Harvard Library and the University, building bridges with collaborators around the globe, and working in harmony as we progress toward our goal of advancing open knowledge. 

As we emphasized last year, our concerns are with commercial models of open access publishing that rely on levying high-price article processing charges (APCs) on the author-side of publications in exchange for removing access and reuse barriers from the reader-side. These models will not secure the future of open access. On the contrary, APCs—and the “transformative” agreements that are based upon them—simply shift economic burdens and crowd out the less wealthy in favor of whoever can afford to pay. ...

Demonstrating the need for paywall-free access to research and the power of “Harvard style” rights-retention policies, our open access, institutional repository DASH has surpassed 65 million worldwide downloads of Harvard-authored scholarship across 58,000 works. This milestone additionally showcases the importance of durable open infrastructure. In fact, over the next year, DASH will migrate to the most advanced version of DSpace, the community-driven and open-source software underlying the repository, to improve interoperability and provide a more user-focused experience. Moreover, DASH is working towards compliance with the “desirable characteristics of digital publication repositories” by participating in the US Repository Network (USRN) Discovery Pilot project. This initiative, led by SPARC and COAR, aims to improve discoverability, interoperability, and tracking of research outputs in US repositories...."