Open Access News

Two new reports from MIT on its two day-old OA mandate:

(1) MIT faculty open access to their scholarly articles, MIT's official press release on the policy, March 20, 2009.  Excerpt:

In a move aimed at broadening access to MIT's research and scholarship, faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have unanimously voted to make their scholarly articles available to the public for free and open access on the Web.

The new policy, which was approved at an MIT faculty meeting on Wednesday, March 18 and took immediate effect, emphasizes MIT's commitment to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.

"The vote is a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas," said Bish Sinyal, chair of the MIT Faculty and the Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning....

MIT's policy is the first faculty-driven, university-wide initiative of its kind in the United States. While Harvard and Stanford universities have implemented open access mandates at some of their schools, MIT is the first to fully implement the policy university-wide as a result of a faculty vote. MIT's resolution is built on similar language adopted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences in 2008.

"Scholarly publishing has so far been based purely on contracts between publishers and individual faculty authors," said Hal Abelson, the Class of 1922 Prof. of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and chair of the Ad-Hoc Faculty Committee on Open Access Publishing. "In that system, faculty members and their institutions are powerless. This resolution changes that by creating a role in the publishing process for the faculty as a whole, not just as isolated individuals." ...

"Through this action, MIT faculty have shown great leadership in the promotion of free and open scholarly communication," said MIT Director of Libraries Ann Wolpert, who worked closely with Abelson and others to move the resolution forward. "In the quest for higher profits, publishers have lost sight of the values of the academy. This will allow authors to advance research and education by making their research available to the world." ...

(2) Natasha Plotkin, MIT Will Publish All Faculty Articles Free In Online Repository, The Tech (from MIT), March 20, 2009.  Excerpt:

...The ad hoc committee’s explanatory document states that the ability to opt out may be especially important for junior faculty “who do not want to jeopardize their ability to work with certain publishers.”

“Initially opt out will get used a fair amount,” said Harold Abelson, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the ad hoc faculty committee that proposed the resolution....

The open access resolution hopes to address two problems with publishing in scientific journals: first, publishers often force faculty members to give up rights to their own articles; second, the same publishers charge exorbitant subscription fees to MIT for access to these articles.

Abelson said that part of the rationale behind the new policy is to leverage MIT’s power as an institution in negotiating with publishing companies to freely distribute their articles.

A document [PS:  not yet online] produced by the ad hoc faculty committee that proposed the resolution stated: “[T]he goal of disseminating research is best served by using the unified action of the faculty to enable individual faculty to distribute their scholarly writings freely,” which “is especially apposite in the face of increasing efforts by some commercial publishers to further close access to the scholarly literature they control.”

Faculty and Libraries staff says that problems in the publishing industry have worsened over the past two decades.

Director of MIT Libraries, Ann J. Wolpert, said “[O]ver the last 15 years, much of scholarly publication has migrated from small societies and associations who had close relationships with researchers in their specific disciplines to a situation where those journals are owned by large international conglomerates — publicly owned in many cases — where the motivation for publishing is to return a margin to shareholders.”

This trend, said Wolpert, has created a situation in which “the way faculty teach and conduct research is greatly at odds with the business models of publishers … Publishers seek to maximize profits by exercising maximal control over [authors’] work, while authors seek to advance research and education.” ...

MIT will not have to spend money on creating the online repository: it will build on DSpace, the platform developed at MIT for collecting PhD dissertations online. Currently there are no plans to hire staff to support the effort to collect and disseminate articles. Current Libraries staff will assist faculty in negotiating contracts with publishers in light of the new policy.

Wolpert said she expects that workflows for submitting and publishing articles online will be implemented no later than June, but could be put in place earlier....