Harvard University was recognized as one of the world’s top three open-access institutions of the year by BioMed Central, an international publisher of journals in science, technology, and medicine and a pioneer in open-access publishing. Harvard Law School was given special recognition for being one of four schools at Harvard to introduce its own open-access mandates.
Following the unanimous FAS vote for open access in 2008, Provost Steven E. Hyman charged the University Library with creating the Office for Scholarly Communication as an integral part of Harvard’s central library services. Led by Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources John Palfrey ’01, the Law School library was an early proponent and adopter of the new policies, making articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository called DASH.
Announced at a ceremony in London on June 9, the award recognizes institutions that have done the most to show leadership in taking steps to expand access to the published results of scholarly research. Along with Harvard, the University of Zurich and the Chinese Academy of Sciences were recognized.