Harvard and APS Reach Accord on Journal Publications

[PAMNET] Harvard and APS Reach Accord on Journal Publications

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The Harvard Office for
Scholarly Communication and the American Physical Society (APS)
announced jointly today that they have entered into an agreement to
facilitate faculty compliance with the University’s open access policies
when Harvard faculty members publish in the APS journals, comprising
Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, and Reviews of Modern Physics.
As a result of the new agreement, APS recognizes Harvard's open access
license and will not require copyright agreement addenda or waivers, in
exchange for Harvard's clarification of its intended use of the license.
In general terms, in exercising its license under the open access
policies, Harvard will not use a facsimile of the published version
without permission of the publisher, will not charge for the display or
distribution of those articles, and will provide an online link to the
publisher's definitive version of the articles where possible.  The
agreement does not restrict fair use of the articles in any way.
Three of Harvard’s ten faculties have passed open access resolutions
within the past 14 months, most recently Harvard’s Kennedy School of
Government. The main beneficiaries of the Harvard-APS agreement will be
physics faculty members, who are no longer obliged to acquire waivers of
Harvard’s prior license. In addition, other institutions and their
authors may find the agreement to be a useful model in their
interactions with APS and other scholarly publishers.
According to Professor Bertrand I. Halperin, Hollis Professor of
Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in the Harvard Physics Department and
Chair of the 2008 Publications Oversight Committee of the American
Physical Society, “Harvard’s open access legislation was always
consistent in spirit with the aims of the APS publication policies, but
there were differences in detail that would have required faculty
members to request a waiver for every article published in an APS
journal. It is a credit both to Harvard and to APS that these
differences have been worked out.  Since APS journals include, arguably,
the most important journals in the field of physics, the fact that
faculty will now be able to continue publishing in APS journals without
seeking a waiver from Harvard’s policies will strengthen both Harvard
and the goal of promoting open access to scholarly publications
worldwide.”
Joseph Serene, Treasurer/Publisher of the American Physical Society,
agreed with Halperin. “Guided by the APS mission to advance and diffuse
the knowledge of physics," he said, "We have since 1996 allowed authors
to post their APS-published papers on their own websites, and their
manuscripts on arXiv and other preprint servers, without embargoes or
other restrictions.  We also permit these postings on their employers'
websites. Hence we applaud the spirit of the new Harvard open access
policies, which we recognize as sharing our fundamental goals for
scientific communication, and we are delighted that we and our
colleagues at Harvard have reconciled the differences in our policies,
to the shared benefit of Harvard authors and of the wider scientific
community."