Feb. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard University professors may publish more research online, free to readers, after the school's arts and sciences faculty adopted a new policy that may be a blow to scholarly journal publishers.

The policy was approved in a voice vote yesterday, according to Robert Mitchell, director of communications for the 730-member arts and sciences faculty. The meeting was held at the university's Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus.

Harvard's decision lends support to the growing open-access movement in academia, an approach opposed by journal-industry representatives who say bypassing journals and their peer-review process may harm the quality of published research.

``This is a large and very important step for scholars throughout the country,'' Stuart Shieber, a computer science professor who sponsored the motion to adopt the new policy, said in a statement released after the vote. ``It should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.''

Discussion of a similar move by the faculties of law, medicine and business are ``well under way,'' and the other faculties, such as education and government, are expected to consider it, Peter Kosewski, a spokesman for Harvard's library system, said in an e-mail. No other votes are scheduled.

The policy would spur professors to distribute work free on a Harvard Web site, rather than through journals that charge subscribers ``enormous amounts of money,'' said Harry Lewis, a professor of computer science at the university. Authors could choose not to share their work on the site and could publish in a traditional journal.

Threat to Publications

A group representing academic journals said the Harvard policy and similar moves that preceded it could force some publications to go out of business.

``These things are cropping up and some of them are misguided and the consequences simply haven't been thought through,'' Ian Russell, chief executive officer of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, in Oxford, in the U.K., said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Russell, who represents both nonprofit and commercial publishers, said journals enhance scholarly work through the peer review process, the prestige they carry and links to previous work.

``Why should that be free? That's value-added material that publishers are adding over and above the raw material,'' Russell said. ``It's like saying you can dig silver out of the ground, and therefore silver knives and forks should be free.''

Outlets for Research

Professors have been free to post their publications on their own Web sites or the Web sites of their academic departments, and have chosen not to, indicating that open access isn't that important to them, said Allan Robert Adler, a spokesman for the Association of American Publishers.

Academic journals, such as Elsevier BV's Applied Geography, Parallel Computing and Water Policy, are the main outlet for scholarly work. In the publish-or-perish environment at universities, careers can be made or broken by journal acceptance.

The Public Library of Science, a free Web site that provides open access to research, is one Internet venture rivaling traditional journals. The National Institutes of Science will begin in April to require all grantees to submit accepted manuscripts to the agency for Internet publication, said Adler, of the Association of American Publishers, which opposes the mandate.

There is a distinction between the new policy at Harvard and what other open-access publications are doing, said Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science. While both are aimed at increasing access to research, Harvard's proposal may not require the same review, he said.

`Strenuous Peer Review'

``We subject everything to strenuous peer review and the act of being accepted means you've met a certain standard,'' Varmus said in a telephone interview.

Lewis, the computer science professor, said many physicists already put their work online and journals continue to publish their articles.

``It has done nothing to the peer review system or to the survival of peer reviewed journals in physics,'' he said.

The policy approved yesterday will make work by Harvard faculty members ``freely accessible everywhere in the world'' and ``reinforce a new effort by Harvard to share its intellectual wealth,'' Robert Darnton, director of Harvard's library system, said in an essay yesterday in the Harvard Crimson, the school's student-run newspaper.

The spiraling cost of scholarly journals, some priced at more than $20,000 a year, has hurt research libraries, Darnton wrote. To afford the journals, libraries reduce purchases of dissertations, causing publishers to cut back on what they put out, hurting the careers of scholars.

Adler said complaints about journal costs amount to ``a very routine vendor-customer dispute.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Kladko in Boston at bkladko@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: February 13, 2008 00:12 EST