The Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy and Environment is pleased to announce that the Project’s faculty, researchers, and staff have adopted an open-access policy. They unanimously endorsed the policy on September 21, 2017 to grant Harvard a nonexclusive and worldwide right to distribute “the fruits of [their] research and scholarship as widely as possible.”
Founded in 1993, the Harvard-China Project is an interdisciplinary research program that collaborates extensively across schools of Harvard and partner universities in China to pursue peer-reviewed inquiries at the intersection of energy, economy, air quality, climate, environmental health, and policy. The open-access policy is consistent with the global nature of the Project’s research mandate and a valuable tool in its integration of Harvard- and China-based scholarship to tackle more effectively the challenges of development and environmental protection in a changing climate.
With the adoption of this policy, the community now has a dedicated collection in the Harvard open-access repository, DASH(Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), with the benefits of persistent URLs, preservation in the Harvard Library, and individualized traffic statistics delivered every month. Project affiliates also have the benefit of the Harvard open license, allowing them to retain rights to their own works that they might not otherwise have retained, and to provide open access to their future scholarly articles without the need to negotiate with publishers. The Harvard-China Project policy follows the model of the Harvard school-level policies by including a waiver option to ensure academic freedom.