Last February, the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Harvard University voted unanimously in favor of an open access mandate.

Now Harvard’s online Open Access Repository, Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) has made its beta launch. DASH is built on the open source DSPACE repository project, and Harvard’s researcher social networking platform,?Profiles.

There are currently over 1500 items in DASH, with new material being added all the time. In addition to the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Harvard Law School, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education have also signed on to the open access mandate and will begin contributing work to the repository.