THIS JUST IN: The Harvard Graduate School of Education announced today that its faculty has voted “overwhelmingly” to join the burgeoning “open access” movement in academia.
According to the press release, the ed school is the fourth of Harvard’s 10 schools to agree to make faculty members’ scholarly articles freely available online. The faculties at the law school, the school of arts and sciences, and the Kennedy School of Government all voted in recent months to do the same.
For the education field, the move is significant. That’s because, outside of a handful of electronic journals, most education studies can only be accessed by subscribers of pricey academic journals.
But, as influential as Harvard’s new policy is bound to be, the ed school isn’t the first to jump feet first into “open access” publishing. Stanford University’s ed school broke that ground in July. For details on Stanford’s plans, and on the advantages and disadvantages of making academic content available to the public for free, see this EdWeek article I wrote last year.