March 15, 2016
Last year (April 2015) the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication issued a request for proposals to write "a comprehensive literature review on methods for converting subscription-based scholarly journals to open access."
In June 2015 we awarded the contract to David Solomon, Bo-Christer Björk, and Mikael Laakso.
We're happy to announce today that the preliminary version of their report is now open for public comments.
Please read it and add comments, and please spread the word to help us gather as many useful comments as possible.
From our original RFP: "The purpose of the public comments is to supplement the literature review, make it more complete, more detailed, and more useful. For example, the public comments might add readings omitted from the literature review, extract new recommendations from readings already covered, suggest new clarity or detail for recommendations already formulated, and add notes to help readers consider the merits of the recommendations."
The version we release today will not be the final version. After the public-comment period (toward the end of April 2016), we'll create a new version incorporating selected public comments, and pass it to a panel of experts for an additional set of comments. Then Dave, Bo-Christer, and Mikael will make their final revisions in light of the public comments, the panelist comments, our comments from within the Office for Scholarly Communication, and their own second thoughts. We'll add a preface and publish that version in the summer or early fall.
We don't promise to incorporate all the public comments in the final version, not even all attributed comments. But we'll favor comments that carry real-name attribution. The panelist comments will all carry real-name attribution.
(If you post a comment on the document, you'll be granting us permission to include it in this and future versions under a CC-BY version 4.0 international license.)
We thank Arcadia for the funds we used to commission this research.
We thank Eddie Tejeda, Christian Wach, and the Institute for the Future of the Book for CommentPress, the open-source WordPress plugin we're using to post the current draft for public comments. We also thank Kathleen Fitzpatrick for the CommentPress theme we adapted for the present use.
Finally, we thank David Solomon, Bo-Christer Björk, and Mikael Laakso for their careful research and their willingness to subject it to public comment before final publication.