Criminal Law Library Blog

From: “This Week’s News”, Library Journal.com (May 29, 2008).

Last week, Harvard University professor Stuart Shieber made history-he was named the first director of Harvard’s newly minted Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC). In his new role, Shieber will oversee the implementation of the university’s groundbreaking open access mandate, which he helped author, and which many suggest could have wide-ranging implications for the future of scholarly communication. “Let’s not go overboard,” Shieber says with a laugh and an audible wince when asked if he views his new role as a historic opportunity. “People like to extrapolate that [the mandate] will have a revolutionary effect. But you can’t make a policy based on that extrapolation. Sometimes there’s too much talk about momentous, revolutionary effects, it gets too far in front of what is really happening. There are lots of things going on, and there will be changes. We’re just trying to do our part.”

That sober approach should be heartening to observers concerned with getting the implementation rolling. In a conversation with the LJ Academic Newswire this week, Shieber embraced a straightforward mission “to support the efforts of the Harvard faculty to make their collective scholarly output as broadly available as possible.” It’s a big job, Shieber conceded, and one he didn’t necessarily expect to fall to him, despite his role in authoring the policy. “Certainly, there was no lobbying effort,” he laughed, when asked if he had expected to be tapped to lead the OSC. “But I have spent lots of time and effort on these issues, so it was a natural fit.”