From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 23 May 2013 09:23:12 -0400

Peter Suber to Direct Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication

Succeeds Founding Director Stuart Shieber

http://library.harvard.edu/peter-suber-direct-harvard’s-office-scholarly-communication

May 21, 2013—The Harvard Library and the Berkman Center for Internet &
Society at Harvard University are pleased to announce the appointment
of Peter Suber as director of the Office for Scholarly Communication
(OSC), starting July 1, 2013. Suber will continue his current
activities as director of the Harvard Open Access Project, based at
the Berkman Center, as well as his affiliations as a Berkman faculty
fellow, senior researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition (SPARC), and research professor of philosophy at
Earlham College.

Suber's new role with the OSC closely aligns with his work leading the
Harvard Open Access Project. Both are driven by a common vision for
opening access to cutting-edge research for everyone who can make use
of it. Integrating the two roles into one position will allow the
projects to better share strategies, staff, resources, and knowledge,
and accelerate the progress of open access both within and beyond
Harvard.

“This new phase of collaboration represents a wonderful recognition,
extension, and synchronization of the efforts of the Berkman Center
and the Harvard Library. It promises continued progress inside Harvard
as well as leadership and collaboration outside its increasingly
permeable walls,” said Urs Gasser, Berkman’s executive director.

Suber is taking over executive leadership of the OSC from Stuart
Shieber, Welch Professor of Computer Science in Harvard’s School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences and founding faculty director of the
OSC. Shieber will continue as faculty director, though with a reduced
role, co-chairing the Faculty Advisory Committee to the OSC with
Suber, serving in an advisory capacity to the Office, and working on
individual projects with the OSC. Sue Kriegsman, OSC program manager,
will continue to oversee the Office’s operations and staff, as the
activities of the Office continue to expand and mature.

According to Shieber, “Peter Suber is the world expert on open access;
he literally wrote the book on the topic (Open Access, 2012, MIT
Press). I am tremendously excited to get Peter even more involved in
the OSC, where his leadership will foster our position at the
forefront of the open-access revolution.”

University Librarian Robert Darnton noted the importance of the OSC to
Harvard and to the scholarly community more broadly. “Under the
leadership of Stuart Shieber, the OSC has placed Harvard at the
forefront of the open-access movement. Peter Suber is the ideal choice
to carry on that tradition and enhance it,” he said.

The Office for Scholarly Communication spearheads campus-wide
initiatives to open, share, and preserve scholarship. In cooperation
with the OSC, faculty at eight of Harvard’s schools have put in place
default rights-retention open-access policies, which have influenced
similar policies at universities throughout the world. The Digital
Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) repository established and
operated by the OSC holds more than 12,000 scholarly articles, which
have been downloaded almost 1.5 million times from every continent,
some 3,000 downloads per day. The Library Lab program, funded by the
Arcadia Fund and managed by the OSC, has supported dozens of
entrepreneurial grants within the Harvard Library system to solve
problems and improve services.

The Arcadia-funded Harvard Open Access Project is housed at the
Berkman Center for Internet & Society and works with the OSC to foster
open access within Harvard. At the same time, it looks outward to
promote open access beyond Harvard. It currently consults pro bono
with more than 40 universities, foundations, publishers, and
government agencies on their open-access policies. It maintains a
widely-endorsed guide to good practices for university open-access
policies, and a series of reference pages on topics such as federal
open-access legislation, business models for open-access journals and
books, and scholarly societies publishing open-access journals. HOAP
also runs the Open Access Tracking Project, a comprehensive source of
real-time news and comment on worldwide open-access developments.