Open access at Harvard

I wrote last summer about open access in Switzerland. The recently adopted federal budget also requires that all investigators receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health deposit a copy of articles supported by that funding in PubMed Centra. Now Harvard has joined in.

Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences has voted to require faculty to make copies of their research freely available through the Office of Scholarly Communications. (source)

Harvard is the first institution I know of to mandate open archiving. It's not clear how the mandate will be enforced, but

The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. (source)

It will be interesting to see how this works out.