Why Open Access Publication for The History Manifesto? Sep 24, 2014 By David and Jo Even two or three years ago, most academics in the humanities, and certainly most members of the non-academic public, had not heard much if anything about the Open Access movement.
The publication of the Finch Report in the UK and the great success of open access initiatives in the natural sciences have changed all that. This has led to a broader conversation, around the world, about the accessibility of academic work and the barriers that prevent its widest circulation. The History Manifesto. Amazon. The Case for Open Access. The motion before the FAS in support of open access to scholarly articles concerns openness in general.
It is meant to promote the free communication of knowledge. By retaining rights for the widest possible dissemination of the faculty’s work, it would make scholarship by members of the FAS freely accessible everywhere in the world, and it would reinforce a new effort by Harvard to share its intellectual wealth. The University Library has taken a leading role in that endeavor. Far from reserving its resources for the privileged few, it is digitizing its special collections, opening them to everyone online, and cooperating with Google in the attempt to make books in the public domain actually available to the public, a worldwide public, which extends everywhere that people have access to the Internet. Finding Happiness in a Harvard Classroom.