The Harvard Law School joined its Faculty of Arts & Sciences in mandating open access for all its peer-reviewed publications. As reported here earlier, the Faculty of Arts & Sciences unanimously mandated open access in February of this year.

Read the full announcement.

From the announcement:

The Harvard Law School faculty produces some of the most exciting, groundbreaking scholarship in the world," said Dean Elena Kagan '86. "Our decision to embrace 'open access' means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the Law School....
Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit. ...

Jennifer Howard, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, is reporting today that a new venture with prominent academic backers wants to help humanists put their work online.

Open Humanities Press, will open it's doors on Monday (May 12) with the publication of seven peer-reviewed journals, which have established track records as open access titles.:
Cosmos and History (2005-)
Culture Machine (1999-)
Fibreculture (2003-)
Film-Philosophy (1997-)
International Journal of Žižek Studies (2007-)
Parrhesia (2006-)
Vectors (2005-)

From the OHP website: "Open Humanities Press journals are fully peer reviewed, scholarly publications that have been chosen by OHP's editorial advisory board for their outstanding contribution to contemporary theory. OHP's journals are independent, published under open access licenses and free of charge to readers and authors alike."

Each journal will retain editorial independence. The press will "provide editorial and technical-development services, using the Open Journal Systems software created by the Public Knowledge Project, and it will help with distribution and promotion". Aside from the editorial boards of the various journals, the Open Humanities Press has, according to the Chronicle, put together a

star-studded lineup of literary critics and theorists as its editorial advisory board. The panel includes Alan Badiou, professor of philosophy emeritus at France's École Normale Supérieure; Jonathan Culler, professor of English and comparative literature at Cornell University; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, professor in the humanities at Columbia University; and J. Hillis Miller, professor of English at the University of California at Irvine. Another member is Stephen Greenblatt, professor of the humanities at Harvard University. In 2002, as president of the Modern Language Association, Mr. Greenblatt issued a rallying cry to humanists about the crisis in traditional scholarly publishing.

How is this being paid for? And what is are it's long-term goals? From the Chronicle article:

To begin with, the press will have no operating budget and no formal staff. Internet hosting is being provided gratis by ibiblio, a sort of Internet library—or "conservancy," as they call it—based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The founders will draw on their professional networks, and those of the journals, to get things done in the near term.

Those involved with Open Humanities Press hope to expand beyond critical theory, perhaps even beyond journals and into open-access monographs, once the enterprise has a reputation for what Mr. Ottina called "rigorous academic quality."

"Ultimately," he said, "the goal is to get as much academic content into an open-access distribution model as possible."

In an editorial entitled "You wrote it, you own it", Emma Hill and Mike Rossner (Executive Editor of The Journal of Cell Biology and Executive Director of The Rockefeller University Press, respectively) announced in the Journal of Cell Biology, April 30, 2008 that the Rockefeller University Press, rather than requiring that authors assign their their copyrights to the Press, they would henceforth just grant the Press an exclusive license for 6 months. The authors who publish in the three Press journals, The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, or The Journal of General Physiology will henceforth be allowed to keep their copyrights.

Excerpts of the editorial:

This permits authors to reuse their own work in any way, as long as they attribute it to the original publication. Third parties may use our published materials under a Creative Commons license, six months after publication...

In 1787, the Copyright Clause of the United States Constitution gave the United States Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." For more than two centuries, however, authors of scientific papers have been giving up that right. ... On the positive side, the publisher defended against improper use of the authors' work; on the negative side, restrictions were placed on authors (and third parties) that limited the reuse of the published work.

In a further step to enhance the utility of scientific content, we have now decided to return copyright to our authors. In return, however, we require authors to make their work available for reuse by the public. Instead of relinquishing copyright, our authors will now provide us with a license to publish their work. This license, however, places no restrictions on how authors can reuse their own work; we only require them to attribute the work to its original publication. Six months after publication, third parties (that is, anyone who is not an author) can use the material we publish under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

The Creative Commons License will apply retroactively to all work published by The Rockefeller University Press before November 1, 2007... Authors who previously assigned their copyright to the Press are now granted the right to use their own work in any way they like, as long as they acknowledge the original publication.

We are pleased to finally comply with the original spirit of copyright in our continuing effort to promote public access to the published biomedical literature.

Full text of our new copyright policy is available here: http://www.jcb.org/misc/terms.shtml.

The University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana is now a Supporting Member of the open access publisher, BioMed Central.

What this means is that when you submit a journal article for publication in one of nearly 200 BMC titles, you will receive a 15% discount off the article processing charge!

Here's a list of the BMC titles:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/browse/journals/.
This discount also applies to articles submitted to Chemistry Central
http://www.chemistrycentral.com/ and to PhysMath Central http://www.physmathcentral.com/.

Here's a list of the article processing charges for the various BMC journals (before discount):
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apcfaq
For most of the journals, the fee is $1690, but may be as high as $2685 or as low as $500. A few are even free.

Many of the BMC journals have already earned quite respectable Impact Factors. See:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/faq?name=impactfactor
e.g., Genome Biology (7.17); BMC Bioinformatics (3.62); BMC Biology (4.43); BMC Evolutionary Biology (4.46)

Why should you consider publishing in a BMC journal?
First of all, know that all research submitted will receive rigorous and rapid peer review. If the article is accepted:

• It will be accessible to anyone with an Internet connection - open access means no subscriptions or 'pay-per-view' charges for original research articles.
  
• It is more likely to be cited, as it will be freely available to the entire global biological and medical community
  
• It will be listed in PubMed within days of publication
  
• You retain the copyright of your work
  
• You will be able to view your article's access statistics, which average over 200 downloads per month per article
  
• Your articles will be securely and permanently archived in PubMed Central

Papers published by our colleagues:
The University of Illinois' "homepage" lists papers that were published in BMC jouranls by U of I authors in the last year -- at this point 30 research articles, software, protocols, etc:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/inst/11700
For your interest, here's the U of I-Chicago's home page:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/inst/48900

Submitting a paper:
If you are on campus within our recognized IP range when submitting a manuscript you will be identified as belonging to a member institution and automatically granted a 15% discount on article processing charges If you are at home or at an external terminal when submitting your paper, you can still claim this discount by stating that you are a affiliated with the U of I. Papers may be submitted either via a journal home page or via http://www.biomedcentral.com/manuscript/.

Writing in her blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, Heather Morrison has reported an analysis of the % of free cancer literature that's available thorugh PubMed. I'm sure she'll be tracking the availablity of this literature over time, considering the NIH Public Access mandate that is set to go into force in just a week -- April 7th. What she's finding at this point in time is that most of the cancer literature is NOT freely accessible.

Cancer: 13% of the literature in PubMed on cancer links to Free Fulltext.

By publication date range:
7% - within last 30 days
10% - within the last year
17% - within the last two years
21% - within the last 10 years

Data on other topics indicates a range of percentages of literature that is Free Fulltext. Of the topics selected, the highest percentage was for genetics, with 30% Free Fulltext, and the lowest was dentistry, with 4% fulltext. Most topics appear to be close to the 13% range.

Please refer to the blog entry for a link to the data, which Heather has made freely available via Google's Spreadsheets.