Harvard Law School is the first law school to make open access mandatory for its scholarly articles. The Harvard Law School faculty made the move to open access by unanimous vote, requiring each faculty member’s scholarly articles to be available online for free. The venerable institution’s announcement includes some justifiable pride:
“The Harvard Law School faculty produces some of the most exciting, groundbreaking scholarship in the world,” said Dean Elena Kagan ‘86. “Our decision to embrace ‘open access’ means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the Law School.”
Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit . . . .
