The OSC, which will be under the oversight of a faculty advisory committee, will be responsible for executing the University’s open-access policy. It will undertake many related activities, which could include the online distribution of Ph.D. dissertations and of gray literature (datasets, technical reports, occasional lectures), support for open-access journal publishing, and sponsoring of conferences. The OSC also will coordinate other University-wide open-access initiatives, and all the faculties of the University will be invited to join in a common effort to transmit scholarly articles to a central repository.

Law School Adopts Open Access for Scholarship, Athena Y. Jiang, The Harvard Crimson, May 7, 2008. Excerpt:

Following a growing trend toward openness in academic scholarship, Harvard’s law faculty voted unanimously last Thursday to approve a policy that would make the school’s research articles free and publicly available.

Harvard Law School will file all of its faculty members’ publications in an online database, the content of which will be available to members of the public, according to a statement. Members of the faculty will have the choice to opt out and to distribute their articles on their own Web sites, providing they do not profit from the publications.

In February, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences made national headlines when it passed a similar policy …

See also: Harvard Law School joins Harvard FAS in mandating OA, Peter Suber, Open Access News, May 7, 2008.