Scholarly access to all
Never heard of Svalbard and Jan Mayen? Join the club. These Norse islands in the remote Arctic Ocean are among the few places in the world with no recorded downloads from Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH), the free and open repository for peer-reviewed literature written by Harvard faculty. With more than 20,000 items in storage, DASH is growing quickly. Since it started in 2009, the articles and dissertations in its repository have been downloaded more than 3.4 million times. DASH shows the increasing attraction of digital access to information. In May, the number of downloads was twice the number of items loaned or renewed by Harvard’s libraries, said repository manager Colin Lukens. In the same month, he said, DASH downloads exceeded the number of requests made through HOLLIS, the open-to-all platform for Harvard Library system inquiries. “The curve is up,” said Peter Suber, director of the Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC),...