Today, our friends at Open Culture are featuring an interesting report concerning a motion recently passed by Harvard University, requiring its faculty members to publish their scholarly articles online. This motion will not only provide momentum to the open access movement, but will also alleviate quite a bit of pressure on Harvard’s library budget.

Robert Darnton, an eminent historian who now oversees Harvard’s libraries, has published an article entitled “The Case for Open Access” in which he underscores the manner in which digital publishing can relieve some important financial pressures on the academy. Citing Darnton, OC reports that “in order to purchase [costly scholarly] journals, libraries have had to reduce their acquisitions of monographs; the reduced demand among libraries for monographs has forced university presses to cut back on the publication of them; and the near impossibility of publishing their dissertations has jeopardized the careers of a whole generation of scholars in many fields.” OC asserts that digital publishing solves this spiraling problem in a straightforward way. The cost of publishing directly to the web is negligible. “There’s no pulp to buy, no publisher’s overhead to pay; no corporation […] looking to pad its profits and get thanked by Wall Street. The cost savings are everywhere.”

Of course the traditional publishers will be quick suggest that this development will undermine the peer-review system that ensures the overall integrity of research. However, OC asserts that there’s no reason digital publishing and peer review can’t coexist. In fact, digital publishing makes possible new Web 2.0 forms of peer review that haven’t existed until now.

For more information, be sure to check out Open Culture’s full article. And for more on the Open Educational Resources movement, check out the Hewlett Foundation’s new site devoted to the aggregation of OER resources.