Open access and “A Subversive Proposal” | Copyright Corner

"In 2012, The Ohio State University Libraries adopted the Faculty Open Access Resolution, which requires Ohio State Libraries’ faculty to grant the University a license to make their scholarly articles openly accessible.  The goal of this initiative, and open access in general, is to increase the accessibility of research so that others can easily make use of it ... An important contributor to the open access movement is Stevan Harnad.  In 1994, Harnad posted a message to a discussion list on electronic journals hosted by the Virginia Polytechnic Institute.  Hamad’s message, titled “A Subversive Proposal”, suggested that researchers should make their papers freely available.  The message sparked significant discussion and Harnad is now creditedwith initiating the concept of self-archiving.  In 1995, Harnad’s original message and the email discussion it provoked were collected into a book: Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing.  The full copy of that book is available through HathiTrust, under an open-access, Google digitized license. In honor of the proposal’s twentieth anniversary, Richard Poynder posted an interview with Harnad titled 'The Subversive Proposal at 20', which looks back at the proposal’s impact and discusses the development of the open access movement ..."