About the Repository

Two good reasons: to advance scholarship, and to take a stand for open access to research.

All scholarship depends on work that has been done before. For your own thesis, you've drawn on the insights, investigations, and analysis of a whole crowd of your predecessors, and they drew in turn from theirs. In the days when a thesis sat only in a bound paper copy on a shelf in a Harvard library, students' work would rarely be available to serve as more than a dead end in the ongoing chain of scholars drawing upon scholars; in the age of the Internet it's now feasible to make a thesis effortlessly available and Google-discoverable to the whole world. You free your thesis so that scholars after you can find your work and build upon it.

At the same time, there's a larger issue to which you contribute by freeing your thesis. Today taxpayers and universities pay researchers to do research, write up the results, and review each others' papers, which the researchers then sign over to journal publishers who charge the same taxpayers and universities exorbitant prices for access to those papers. These prices are tough even for Harvard to pay, and for less-wealthy institutions, most individuals, and researchers in the developing world they form a high barrier that restricts knowledge, slows the advance of scholarship, and obstructs urgent work against AIDS and other diseases.

A growing number of senior academics are taking action to expand open access to the results of research. By freeing your thesis, you vote with your work: you show your support for open access in a way nobody can ignore.

Are you thinking of publishing your thesis in a book or journal in the future? Some publishers might balk at the thought that your magnum opus is already freely available to the world in electronic form; you can probably work things out, but think it over and get advice from professors in your field. If like most Harvard seniors you're not planning to turn this work into something you have to haggle with a publisher over, you've got complete freedom in what you do with it—University policy (see below) is clear that you retain the copyright in your academic work, and all its privileges. The only downside is that the whole world discovers how brilliant you are...

Yes, with certain exceptions, as best we can tell. A "Statement of Policy" adopted by the Corporation says your work remains your own copyright-wise, with what appear to be just two exceptions that could apply to some theses:

• if your work is funded by a grant from outside Harvard and the grant has conditions attached, then they govern;
• if you made an explicit agreement with the University, then naturally that agreement governs.

If either of these applies to you, you probably know about it.

If you're not funded by a disclosure-limiting outside grant and you haven't made a special agreement with Harvard that restricts what you can do with your work, then there are no constraints on how you can dispose of it (except for turning it in, of course!) In particular you can give the world permission to read your thesis, make and share copies, and incorporate or adapt it into fresh works—in other words, you can free it here.

Of course, we're students, not lawyers, and nothing here is legal advice.

To make sure your thesis is always available for scholars to build on, we ask that you give everyone permission to do the things you'd want to be able to do with a scholarly work you liked: download the work, read it, keep copies, share it with other people, and adapt it into fresh works. The specific legal permission we ask for is the Creative Commons Attribution License, the same one required by the world's leading biology journal PLoS Biology and the other journals of the Public Library of Science.

No. When you free your thesis at the Harvard College Thesis Repository, you give the world permission to make and share copies of your work, and to incorporate or adapt it into fresh works they might create—all vital activities at the core of scholarship. You give nobody permission to conceal your authorship or to pass your work off as their own, and colleagues confronting a plagiarist who's thus abused your work are unlikely to be amused by the excuse that you made it available for the advance of scholarship here.

Indeed, as many professors have discovered in recent years, the quickest way to catch a plagiarist is by searching the Web; by making your thesis freely viewable at the Thesis Repository you increase the chance that any attempt at plagiarism will be detected.

Absolutely! We focus on student work because we're students ourselves, and while there are a lot of professors talking to their colleagues about this issue, there aren't many people talking to students. The best possible outcome of this Thesis Repository is that it helps Harvard decide to set up a general repository for all its researchers (into which we'll happily incorporate the theses here), that all of you who go on into academia think about making your future work openly accessible, and that along the way the scholarship in the theses here helps advance and disseminate knowledge.

Yes and yes. One of the strengths of open-access models of publishing is that the way we organize our repository doesn't have to be the last word—because you've given permission for others to share copies of your work, anyone with their own bright idea for how to make scholarly work searchable and otherwise accessible can slurp our data into their own system. The Protocol for Metadata Harvesting of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI-PMH) is a technical standard by which major repositories from arXiv.org and CiteSeer to the Harvard-Smithsonian Digital Video Library here at Harvard make their information accessible. If you like talking directly to computers, you can visit our OAI-PMH interface yourself; perhaps better, you can point an OAI harvester at it.

We are Harvard undergrads Greg Price and Grant Dasher, law student Charles Duan, and other members of Harvard College Free Culture. You can reach us all at thesis(at)hcs.harvard.edu.

Ask us your question at thesis(at)hcs.harvard.edu! Operators are standing by to give you the most cogent and helpful response we know how to make, or a pointer to someone who can if we can't.