Harvard’s open access (OA) policy, which has become a template for many institutional OA policies, intrinsically undermines the rights of scholars, researchers, authors and university staff, and it adulterates a principal tenet of open access, namely, that authors should control the intellectual property rights to their material. Assessing the implications of Harvard’s open access policy in the light of Peter Suber’s landmark book, Open Access, as well as resources from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and Title 17 of the United States Code (USC), this article uncovers an intellectual ‘landgrab’ by universities that may at times not work in the interest of the author or creator of research and weakens the appeal of open access.