Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously last week to post their finished academic papers online for free, and a Penn Faculty Senate committee is now discussing the merits of such proposals.
The Penn Senate Committee on Students and Educational Policy is scheduled to discuss the possibility of adopting a similar plan, said Faculty Senate Chairman Larry Gladney.
Thus far, professors have said they are somewhat leery about widespread online publishing.
Gladney said it is unlikely that Penn would ever mandate a specific policy because "it might be interpreted as an infringement on academic freedom to proscribe where scholars can publish."
At Harvard, the school will publish all finished papers in a repository run by its library unless professors specifically request to opt-out by signing a waiver.
Authors are not restricted to publishing their work through the University, and faculty members can still submit their work for publication in prestigious journals.
But at Penn, Gladney said, SCSEP might issue a recommendation that strongly encourages faculty to post their work in open repositories, rather than form an opt-out program.
Penn faculty, however, already have one University-sponsored way to publish work online in ScholarlyCommons@Penn, a digital research depository that, as of September, contained 3,000 papers by Penn professors.
Marjorie Hassen, director of public services at Van Pelt, said Harvard's open-access plan will help ScholarlyCommons' efforts to encourage faculty to post work online.
"This gives us another talking point when we go out to talk to departments," she said, adding that the it provides "options for faculty who are interested in exploring a different way to disseminate their research."
Gladney said it's more reasonable to ask professors in certain fields to publish their work online than others.
"Personally, I'm in a field that has made its publications available in pre-print form for a decade," said Gladney, a Physics and Astronomy professor.
On the other hand, adopting an open-access program like Harvard would not benefit the History of Art department at Penn, said Art History professor Larry Silver.
According to Silver, it costs hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars to publish copyrighted art images in journals.
Silver said he does not think the University will be willing to pay these costs, forcing art historians to publish their academic work without images, risk being sued or not publish at all.
SCSEP member and History professor Michael Zuckerman added that since researchers in all disciplines quote and reference other sources, those who publish their work freely online might find themselves "at the wrong end of a lawsuit for invasion of someone else's intellectual property."
But an advantage of Harvard's plan is that libraries could buy more books if they did not spend thousands of dollars on journal subscriptions, Silver said.
Harvard's decision, however, also raises questions about universities' efforts "to commandeer the scholarship of their faculty," Zuckerman said, adding that he is unsure of how much control "will fall within the domain of the University and how much will remain with the individual faculty member."
