Professors with Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted unanimously yesterday to give the university license to post their research and scholarly papers in a new online repository at Harvard, making their articles freely accessible, according to the Boston Globe.

Inside Higher Ed writes that Harvard stands out among other universities with similar initiatives by being more aggressive in getting professors to make their articles open-access. Professors with the FAS will need to opt out of having their articles posted online for free by filling out a waiver.

What’s not clear to me yet is what version of an article will Harvard require to be posted: Pre-peer-reviewed? Post-accepted but unedited? Fully edited? This is an important question because some journals allow only certain versions of a manuscript to be placed in public repositories (some don’t allow any versions at all to be freely posted). I checked, for example, Nature’s policy and here’s what it says:

When a manuscript is accepted for publication in an NPG journal, authors are encouraged to submit the author’s version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) to PubMedCentral or other appropriate funding body’s archive, for public release six months after publication. In addition, authors are encouraged to archive this version of the manuscript in their institution’s repositories and, if they wish, on their personal websites, also six months after the original publication.

It remains to be seen what will happen if this new Harvard policy ends up not being compatible with the polices of journals. Who will budge first? Will the journals loosen their rules for fear that they won’t get submissions from Harvard researchers, who are presumably doing top work? Or will scientists, driven by their desire to publish in these journals, sign that waiver? It will be very interesting to see what happens here. Will other universities follow Harvard’s example?

My colleague, Hilary Spencer of Nature Precedings, has posted some commentary on this news in the Publishing in the New Millennium Forum. She has pretty much the same questions as I did and has given some more background on the widely varying policies of journals.

Update: The Scientist is reporting that the Harvard policy requires that papers be posted immediately after being accepted for publication. This sounds like it wouldn’t be compatible with some journals’ policies requiring that papers be posted online only a certain amount of time (6 months, in NPG’s case) after publication. The questions I raised above still stand. Will Harvard FAS researchers opt out of this policy so that they can get published in Nature and other journals incompatible with this OA requirement? Or will the journals change their policies? Will they wait to see if more universities will follow Harvard’s suit?

Update 2 (Feb 18): As Maxine has indicated below, Nature News published an article about this on Friday and says that Harvard still has to decide what the time limit is to submit papers for online posting (ie immediately or not?). And it also has to clarify what version of the paper must be posted (ie peer-reviewed or not? accepted for publication or not?). All very important questions that need to be answered to see if this new policy is compatible with the journals’ policies.