Harvard's Arts and Sciences faculty voted unanimously yesterday to make it so that faculty members' scholarly articles will be regularly submitted to an online archive, for all the world to see and make use of. It's a major step forward for academic open access, so huzzah for Harvard -- and school librarian Robert Darnton, who's been pushing for a more transparent and accessible university for a long time. It's not a bad thing to see major universities compete over who can be the most open and do the most good, like we've seen with the standard that MIT set by posting its coursework online.

But there's one point I don't understand, and don't know enough about academic publishing to begin to figure it out. It seems like faculty members will, under this new regime, be required to submit all of their articles to the archive (unless, importantly, they opt-out altogether). The thing is, it seems to me that the moment in the past when a paper/article became a finished creation was when it was readied for publication -- peer-reviewed, edited (I'm guessing). The way things are going to work now, is it now up to the academic herself or himself to decide, "yep, this baby's done and ready for archiving"?

And what if an academic wants to wait and have her or his work go through the 'traditional' review and vetting process before deciding that it's worthy of being saved for posterity? It seems like then he or she has to negotiate the rights to the piece from the journal in question in a way that frees her or his hand to go open access with it once it's published. And that would seem to involve a concession from the journal, which may not be too inclined to make it.