Harvard’s Move Towards Open-Access Scholarship
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has voted to make available their research to the world at large in an open-access framework.
To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.
There are a few details in the announcement, and more can be read about it here. Hopefully this represents a trend for universities, colleges, etc. Many people do not have access to JSTOR, Project Muse, etc., and many articles are published in journals not available in the above mentioned services. Journals do have to make money, or at least not lose too much, in order to continue publishing, and that is one of the reasons that we have libraries.