Stuart M. Shieber ’81 directs the University Library’s new Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC). Shieber received an AB in applied mathematics summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1981 and a PhD in computer science from Stanford in 1989. Having joined the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1989, Shieber was named John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Natural Sciences in 1993, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in 1996, Harvard College Professor in 2001, and James O. Welch, Jr., and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science in 2002. He is the founding director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society and the faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.He was interviewed for Library Notes on June 19.

LN

With open-access policies adopted in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at Harvard Law School, what are OSC’s next steps among the Harvard faculties?

SS

We’re talking to several other faculties right now about open-access policies.  But it’s a separate discussion with each faculty, and different faculties may want to work differently. My guess is that it will take some time for schools who want an open-access policy to come to that decision and to figure out exactly how they want to do it.

It took FAS and the Law School a couple of years to do it. Once we have the repository set up, however, any faculty should be able to use it.

LN

What can you tell us about the organization of the OSC itself?

SS

We’re in the process of hiring a small number of staff—a program manager and an administrative person—who will be located in Wadsworth House. Initially, the office will be responsible for running the repository, implementing the open-access policies in FAS and the Law School, and doing outreach to other schools to help them with considerations of similar policies. We need to ensure that the repository is successful in getting a large percentage of the articles by our faculties deposited.

LN

Has the OSC faculty advisory ommittee been appointed as yet?

SS

The committee is in formation. We have a good base now, and we will be adding additional people over time. We’re trying to get University-wide representation on the committee.

LN

What issues will the committee address over time?

SS

In the long term, there’s a whole range of scholarly communications issues that will be in the purview of OSC: support for faculty publishing in open-access journals, difficult issues in monograph and book publishing in the humanities, access to scientific data, tools for supporting open access, new kinds of scholarly output such as databases and web sites. I’m starting to think about some of these issues and hope to be working soon with a faculty advisory committee for the office on these issues.

LN

What’s the status of the open-access repository?

SS

We’ve started setting up a system based on the DSpace software to operate the repository. Once that’s ready, the plan is to get a small number of beta testers—maybe one or two or three of the departments in FAS—to test out the system. Hopefully, by the fall, we’ll have a version that we’re reasonably happy with where we can do a broader rollout. We’ll keep the repository confined to the Harvard campus before making an official launch that is open to everyone. But I would hope that, during the fall, we’d have the repository fully functioning.

LN

How does the open-access repository relate to other repositories at Harvard—specifically to the DRS?

SS

Right now, the open-access repository that is going to underlie the article-distribution mechanism will be separate from the DRS—though in the long run it may make sense to use the DRS. At the moment, DRS doesn’t have the front-end functionality that we need.

LN

Obviously, you’re working with OIS. Who are you working with?

SS

Dale Flecker of course is the main person we’re working with there. Randy Stern has been leading the development of DSpace. Several people at OIS are making important contributions to the effort.

LN

Will your decision to go live, as it were, be dependent on any particular critical mass in the repository?

SS

It’ll be dependent in general on the experience that we’ve had with the whole process. And also we’d like to have a reasonable number of papers available so that there’s actually some content to be distributed.

LN

When you go to the Harvard Libraries portal at http://lib.harvard.edu, you see a set of tools that let users search books, photographs, e-resources. How will the open-access repository relate to those tools?

SS

My guess is that the primary means by which people will discover articles in the open-access repository will not be by going directly to the repository software. It’s not going to be people saying, “I wonder what Harvard papers there are on such-and-such a topic?” My guess is it’s going to be through aggregation mechanisms. The big one that everyone knows about is Google Scholar. But there are lots of other indexing services that take advantage of the fact that all the major repositories’ software systems these days are interoperable through open standards.

It may be useful also to have connections from various library web sites, but I defer to people at the library who know better than I what the best ways to link the repository into the libraries’ resources will be.

The nice thing about having collected the materials is that once you have them, you can index them in all kinds of ways. You don’t have to pick the way.

LN

How can Harvard librarians help?

SS

Librarians are in contact with faculty all the time. They can play a key role in getting individual faculty members to understand the importance of placing articles in the repository. They tend to be much more knowledgeable about these issues of the repositories and open access and the importance not only for mass distribution but for the faculty member him- or herself of making articles available with open access. So that connection with faculty provides a perfect venue to facilitate the process of moving articles from filing cabinets and computers in the faculty member’s office into the repository.

The most valuable thing in the near term that people in the library can do is to take every opportunity where they meet with faculty to remind them about the importance of attending to publication agreements, about using addenda to make them consistent with open-access policies such as the FAS and NIH policies, to get them to use the repository once it’s up and running, and to track and report any kind of difficulties in using the repository or any uncertainties about rights and obligations. By letting the office know what issues are coming up we can try to address those. The librarians will be on the front line of all of the OSC’s efforts.

For more information on the new Office for Scholarly Communication, visit the OSC web site.