Harvard and the University of California already have done this. I am not sure how widespread it is.

"In 2008, Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously to give the University a nonexclusive, irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly articles for any non-commercial purpose. In the years since, the remaining eight Harvard schools voted similar open-access (OA) policies; as of late 2015, three research centers have joined their number." [1]

"The University of California is committed to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In particular, as a public university system, the University of California is dedicated to making its scholarship available to the people of California. Furthermore, the University of California recognizes the benefits that accrue to its authors as individual scholars and to the scholarly enterprise from such wide dissemination, including greater recognition, more thorough review, consideration, and critique, and a general increase in scientific, scholarly, and critical knowledge. The University of California further recognizes that by such policies, authors of scholarly articles can more easily and collectively reserve rights that might otherwise be signed away, often unnecessarily, in agreements with publishers. To accomplish this, authors take advantage of US copyright law to grant to the University a non-exclusive license (limited to the purpose of making the work openly available) for each scholarly article authored while employed by UC." [2]

[1] https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/policies/

[2] http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-policy/pol...

The quotes you provide establish that Harvard and the UC schools have the right to publish their professors' work for free, but not that they do it.

Open access repos are available for a number of schools. For Harvard, go to https://dash.harvard.edu/ . For Caltech, you can find all author's work here: http://authors.library.caltech.edu/ . Try googling "<University> open access repository" to see if you can find it.

However, I couldn't get online access for the UC system, even though they have a policy and "plan". I suspect that things just take longer at public universities due to bureaucracy.

Moreover, none of the university repositories I've found do anything close to a good job of making the articles searchable. For example, even though all of my papers are available through Caltech, google only provides links to arXiv or the actual journal. This is actually the problem: if you can't google it, it may as well not be on the open internet at all.

> You may publish anywhere, but you must also publish it for free to the academic community.

Is this possible? When publishing in a journal, I think you transfer your copyright to them; thereby preventing you from publishing the article any other way.

Although as far as I know many journals allow a "pre-print version" to be published by the authors on their personal website.

In the computer science world, two of the biggest publishers are the ACM and IEEE professional societies. They both allow authors to post a version on their own webpage (http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy, https://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rig...). I think this situation is a result of the fact that conferences, not journals, are where CS academics target their latest work. Since the conferences are organized by the professional societies, the professional societies became the biggest publisher. I think this is a good thing, as the professional societies are non-profit organizations that exist for the benefit of their members, and society in general. I hope that they will eventually make their entire digital libraries open.

There are CS journals, but even there the ACM and IEEE are big players.

This is already a requirement from several government funding agencies, for instance from NIH:

https://publicaccess.nih.gov

This is based on the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act (which specifies NIH funded research). What would be nice is if this type of act would be passed for all govt. funding agencies.

> When publishing in a journal, I think you transfer your copyright to them

That is correct. I have done this for every publication I've ever put out (O(10)). There may be exceptions but this is certainly the dominant paradigm in the physical sciences.

My two cents: this is bigger than any University. It will require a government funding agency (likely, NIH or NSF) to take a stand vis a vi the public availability of research produced by public funding.

Since a few years ago, any EU or UK public funded research (which is most university research) must be published as open-access. It is a requirement of the funding. So this is already happening. However, it will need to be done by a greater proportion of the world to be effective.

The only problem is that the method of open access publishing is usually to pay a few grand to the publisher for the privilege.

That can be a lot of money. E.g. elsevier charges $5000 / article : http://www.cell.com/rights-sharing-embargoes

And that is money that should be going to research.

I completely agree. I've said it before, pay-for open access (aka. "gold open access") needs to go die in a fire.

The actual rule for European grant (H2020) is "either publish in open-access or put the paper on arxiv or similar archives". We can still publish in non-open access journals provided that we put the paper on an open access repository.

Are you sure? I think it's only funders like Wellcome that require open access. My UK collaborators (in physical sciences) don't publish in open access journals.

Wellcome has required it for a while.

Any papers you plan to use in the Research Excellence Framework for 2020 (for those not acquainted, an exercise every few years where UK universities get to say "look how good we are, we published this many papers, please keep funding us") must be available as open access. It isn't necessary for these papers to have gone the gold open access route (where you pay a *!&^%-ton to the publisher), so you could instead upload the non-published version to a preprint server (which is a lot cheaper).

Do they self-archive? That was common practice back when I was an active researcher (early to mid 2000s).

Agree completely. The government needs to act. As a professor in molecular biology I would be happy with the banning of publishing in for-profit journals.

It's not the for profit part that's the problem. It's the closed access part that is. Afaik, AAAS and ACS run science and all the chemistry journals respectively and they're both nonprofits with frustrating paywalls.

conversely if a for profit could effectively monetize a 100% open access journal, it would be totally fine.

The standard acceptable practice, at least in social sciences, is to publish the working paper. It'll be subtly different since it's pre peer-review and if you're an academic publishing your own paper you'll be expected to cite the full journal verson. But for the average person that wants to read the paper but doesn't have access to the journal, the working paper is more than adequate.

The NIH has already done so, as noted in another comment - there's a brief period under which NIH funded work isn't open access, but then it needs to be available.

Additionally, many copyright transfer agreements expressly allow an institutional archival system.

One of the big drivers in the biological sciences has been non-governmental funding mandating OA, notably the Gates and Wellcome Trusts.

Everyone in the physical sciences uses arXiv.

Note that the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has a pretty good archive of these "personal website" preprints. We're working on making it more easily available, matched up with article DOIs.

If you transfer copyright at all, you typically only transfer it to the ACM, not Springer. Springer is just a contractor running a website and occasionally printing up phone books of papers that no one reads, and USB drives of PDFs people use for the week of the conference.

See http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy

You're assuming the field of computer science, but Springer has journals for many disciplines.

There's no such thing as automatic assignment of copyright to a published. However, there are many bad contracts that come with this nonsense.

You (as a presumed grad student) are the value in the system. If you give the journals your output don't be surprised that they build walls to protect it - they're useless without you and they know it.

They'll allow whatever they have to, and nothing else.

Who at a university like Harvard can make that decision? The Dean? I ask so we as a community can help move the needle.

What platform would you suggest they publish on?

I would say universities are a main cause of the current situation. When faculty are judge by the number of publications and impact factor (typically highest impact are these journals), they can't be surprised when demand outstrips supply and prices go up.

Governement research centers, such as Inria (in France), require researchers to publish their article for free (on HAL): http://www.inria.fr/en/news/news-from-inria/inria-champions-.... And I think that in this US, governement research must be published as public domain. More generally, the ones who give grants (NSF and so on) could require the research to be published in openaccess as one of the conditions to get the grant.