Project Introduction:
Open access
:  Even though Harvard’s open-access policies are widely supported by the community, implementation depends on the cooperation of authors who tend to be overstretched and preoccupied. This team will work towards designing a system of defaults, which ‘nudge’ and encourage faculty to deposit their new scholarly articles in DASH, Harvard’s open-access repository.

Mentors:
Peter Suber / Colin Lukens (Office of Scholarly Communication)

Team Members:
Wendy W Fok (Team Leader) – Harvard Graduate School of Design
Loren D Newman – Harvard Kennedy School
Alexandra M Nicholson – Harvard Business School
Kojin Oshiba – Harvard College

What we worked on
Our team discussed the potentials of social engineering of enabling the entire Harvard University community (Faculty and scholars) to be more proactive into implementing open access policy.

What went well
Our team actively promotes academic freedom and the digital access of scholarly publications within Harvard, and thus would like to seek behavioral encouragement on increasing the deposit range of 10 – 20% (current) rate, to potentially reaching an 80% deposit rate of scholarly  publications into the Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) system.

What was challenging
The current Open Access system at the University level does not have a reminder, or automated system,  to allow faculty and scholars to deposit their works into DASH, upon the publication of their works. Therefore, it has been a difficult task to aggregate the materials from the entire University community. The potentials are to implement various time saving devices and options for faculty and scholars to approach the Open Access more easily.

What’s up next
Various participants of the team members will brainstorm of potential opportunities to encourage and “nudge” their respective Schools, and engage on a larger plan on how to further the potentials of implementing a streamlined Open Access system — whether it be a socially engineered, application based, analogue, and/or coded system.

Updated: 24 September, 2014 – Wendy W Fok