Harvard’s library is creating an online public repository for its private holdings dating to 1638 and the new academic work generated by its professors. (The article references a Faculty meeting where the proposal will be voted on; that happened yesterday, and the proposal passed by a wide margin I’m told).
For the university to shrink away from its proprietary rights on a scale like this is surprising. I’m not exactly sure the common man will be rejoicing in the streets now that he can access the university’s extensive collection of 19th-century daguerreotypes, but it is a gratifying step.
Argues Robert Darnton, the historian and now the director of Harvard’s libraries:
The motion also represents an opportunity to reshape the landscape of learning. A shift in the system for communicating knowledge has created a contradiction at the heart of academic life. We academics provide the content for scholarly journals. We evaluate articles as referees, we serve on editorial boards, we work as editors ourselves, yet the journals force us to buy back our work, in published form, at outrageous prices. Many journals now cost more than $20,000 for a year’s subscription.
Naturally, there is an insular someone, somewhere who objects to it. The New York Times quotes J. Lorand Matory, one of the anti-Summers instigators of several years ago, who complains that undercutting academic publishing houses means that “less popular journals” might be abandoned, and that precious academic conferences might have to be foregone. The tragedy!
If Prof. Matory wants to, there is an opt-out from the Harvard digitization, although that would mean the wider public will be denied his seminal work on Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion (it concerns “male wives and female husbands in Yoruba religion and politics” according to his website — sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up).