Harvard and APS Reach Accord on Journal Publications

["Barbara Hicks" <hicks@aps.org>]

Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication
Wadsworth House 210
Cambridge, MA 02138
Amy Brand PhD  (617) 495-4089

APS Editorial Office
1 Research Road
Ridge, NY 11961
Amy Halsted (631) 591-4232

HARVARD AND AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY REACH ACCORD ON JOURNAL 
PUBLICATIONS

Cambridge, MA & Ridge, NY, April 9, 2009 --The Harvard Office for 
Scholarly Communication and the American Physical Society (APS) 
announced jointly today that they have entered into an agreement 
to facilitate faculty compliance with the University's open 
access policies when Harvard faculty members publish in the APS 
journals, comprising Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, 
and Reviews of Modern Physics.

As a result of the new agreement, APS recognizes Harvard's open 
access license and will not require copyright agreement addenda 
or waivers, in exchange for Harvard's clarification of its 
intended use of the license. In general terms, in exercising its 
license under the open access policies, Harvard will not use a 
facsimile of the published version without permission of the 
publisher, will not charge for the display or distribution of 
those articles, and will provide an online link to the 
publisher's definitive version of the articles where possible. 
The agreement does not restrict fair use of the articles in any 
way.

Three of Harvard's ten faculties have passed open access 
resolutions within the past 14 months, most recently Harvard's 
Kennedy School of Government. The main beneficiaries of the 
Harvard-APS agreement will be physics faculty members, who are no 
longer obliged to acquire waivers of Harvard's prior license. In 
addition, other institutions and their authors may find the 
agreement to be a useful model in their interactions with APS and 
other scholarly publishers.

According to Professor Bertrand I. Halperin, Hollis Professor of 
Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in the Harvard Physics 
Department and Chair of the 2008 Publications Oversight Committee 
of the American Physical Society, "Harvard's open access 
legislation was always consistent in spirit with the aims of the 
APS publication policies, but there were differences in detail 
that would have required faculty members to request a waiver for 
every article published in an APS journal. It is a credit both to 
Harvard and to APS that these differences have been worked out. 
Since APS journals include, arguably, the most important journals 
in the field of physics, the fact that faculty will now be able 
to continue publishing in APS journals without seeking a waiver 
from Harvard's policies will strengthen both Harvard and the goal 
of promoting open access to scholarly publications worldwide."

Joseph Serene, Treasurer/Publisher of the American Physical 
Society, agreed with Halperin. "Guided by the APS mission to 
advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics," he said, "We have 
since 1996 allowed authors to post their APS-published papers on 
their own websites, and their manuscripts on arXiv and other 
preprint servers, without embargoes or other restrictions.  We 
also permit these postings on their employers' websites. Hence we 
applaud the spirit of the new Harvard open access policies, which 
we recognize as sharing our fundamental goals for scientific 
communication, and we are delighted that we and our colleagues at 
Harvard have reconciled the differences in our policies, to the 
shared benefit of Harvard authors and of the wider scientific 
community."

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