OpenScholar: A Harvard invention
In the past few years, more than 13,000 Harvard faculty, students, and staff, individually or in groups, have created more than 6,500 websites on Harvard’s OpenScholar platform, a free, open-source software project based on technology invented and developed at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS). Now available to the Harvard community through a hosted service run in collaboration with Harvard University Information Technology (HUIT) and Harvard Public Affairs and Communications (HPAC), OpenScholar distributes a considerable volume of information by and about Harvard scholars, departments, centers, and projects. It provides the first coherent online presentation of the Harvard brand, empowers individual scholars to create excellent websites, and has saved the University more than $100 million in external Web development fees. It started with faculty websites. “We conceived of OpenScholar because of an opportunity we noticed at IQSS,” said Gary King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor and director of IQSS, “but we...