Harvard's arts and science faculty votes to post research online

Hundreds of professors voted unanimously for the change at a faculty meeting that culminated several months of meetings debating the move. 

While some say academic research should be widely available to people worldwide, academic journal officials said that bypassing their publications might hurt the peer review process. 

Stuart Shieber, a computer science professor who sponsored the motion, said some journals are run like monopolies, charging exorbitant prices for subscriptions. He said the journal Brain Research, for example, charges $21,000 a year. 

"This can be the first step in the process of increasing access to Harvard faculty's writings," Shieber said in a phone interview after the meeting. "That's really the goal. It isn't to reduce prices or put journals out of business." 

Under the plan, Harvard officials will create an office and repository for professors' finished papers run by the university's library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. It would probably be called the Office for Scholarly Communication. 

Academics often sign over the copyright to a journal before publication, and university libraries then buy back the work by subscribing to the publication. Under the new system, academics would retain copyright to their work, allowing the university to post it unless they opt out by filing a waiver. Faculty would then be allowed to publish their work in an academic journal.