Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity

The compact arose as a result of discussions within the university community about providing alternative sustainable, efficient, and effective business models for journal publishing. The compact itself was suggested by Stuart Shieber, Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, and Faculty Director of Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication, and has been discussed at a variety of venues (see, for instance, this video of a talk at Cal Tech), with a longer statement provided through a Perspective piece in PLoS Biology. The campaign for support of the compact is a bottom-up communal effort, with administration through this web site provided by the Office for Scholarly Communication. All aspects of implementation of the compact are the responsibility of the supporting universities; the compact envisions broad experimentation in all aspects of how  to provide the underwriting of fees that the signatories commit to.