Harvard Law School First To Commit To "Mandatory Open Access Policy"

Earlier this year, the faculty at the Harvard Law School unanimously voted to make all their scholarly articles available for free online.

According to the June 15, 2008 issue of Library Journal, this makes Harvard Law "the first law school to commit to a 'mandatory open access policy' via an institutional repository".

This means the contents would be searchable by other services such as Google Scholar. Authors could legally post the articles on their own websites, and educators could also freely provide the articles to students.

This follows the decision last winter by Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences to mandate open access for its members' research works.