Granted, most people don’t follow the intracacies of what is going on with the academic publishing market, but this thing called the Internets really seems to be gaining traction among academics. And why wouldn’t it? I mean the Wurl Wide Web itself was invented so that scholars could more easily share their scholarship online. They are doing it. There are now over 3,000 Open Access - meaning “peer reviewed research, freely available, and without copyright restriction” on the Internets. There are also over 900 “repositories” - yep just what it sounds - places to store academic research on the Internets, and those repositories hold over 16,000,000 articles, and not all of them are global warming tracts by Al Gore.

Yes, just as Pronetos declared in 2003 before there was any such thing as social networking, and really only one group of scholars was using the Internet in any big way (props to the Physics Community), the web was destined to become the dominant mode of scholarly communication AND publication for scholars, and yesterday, Pronetos, and all other forward thinking scholars got a big boost.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University approved a policy which requires Harvard faculty to deposit their works in Harvard’s Repository. What? HARVARD FACUILTY HAVE TO POST THEIR RESEARCH FREE, ONLINE FOR ANYONE TO ACCESS, DOWNLOAD AND DISTRIBUTE.

This is great news, and surely other leading research institutions will follow, not wanting to be outdone by Harvard. And well they should. But most importantly, this is conclusinve evidence, that absolutely ends the debate over the Pronetos business plan. Open Access is the mainstream. There is no debate. The old copyright rules DO NOT APPLY in scholarship anymore. This debate is settled. There are many, many, profitable Open Access publications being created from stores of documents in repositories. This is all that Proentos wants to do people - build a global research archive, then allow scholars to access, and download those papers for free. IF those scholars want us to publish and print a selection of those documents into a custom publication, we’ll do it for a fee (just like LOTS of other publishers out there).

So, congratulations to the Haravard Faculty for proving that they really are thought leaders (as if there was any doubt), and props to the New York Times for showing that this debate over Open Access, and where scholarly communication is headed is not some wierd arcane debate - it is a mainstream topic, covered in the most accessible press. And if you missed the picture above - the story of Harvard’s historic vote was the most e-mailed story in the NYT Books section, AND the story appeared on the front of yesterday’s NYT online edition. Good job, NYT.