Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, March 25, 2009

More on the MIT policy

Here are some more comments on MIT's OA mandate from the press and blogosphere.

From Andrew Albanese at Library Journal:

Another week, another new faculty open access mandate....

From Kim Flintoff at Dramatech Space:

In smaller, less confident universities there still seems to be a misguided belief that holding onto new knowledge and metering its release through relatively exclusive, and often overpriced, academic journals somehow lends prestige to the organisation. Moves like this by MIT reveal those others for what they are - petty bureaucracies festering in unhealthy insecurity....

All kudos to MIT and those that forged the way before them for having the confidence, and corporate intelligence to shed the limiting practices of elite publishing and getting new knowledge into circulation more quickly where its relevance can be tested and incorporated in current practice.

I predict that this will also begin to shift expectations about higher degree research.

From Alexis Madrigal at Wired Science:

Scientific publishing might have just reached a tipping point, thanks to a new open access policy at MIT....

Hal Abelson, who spearheaded the effort, said that these agreements went beyond providing a repository for papers, they changed the power dynamics between scientific publishers and researchers.

"What's important here is that it's giving the University a formal role in how publications happen," Abelson said. "Some of the faculty said, 'You're calling this an open access resolution but actually the way to think of it is as a collective bargaining agreement.'" ...

From Marissa Taylor at Digits (a Wall Street Journal blog):

...[Prof. Hal Abelson], who is also a founding director of the copyright nonprofit Creative Commons, says that...[w]hile online databases and journals make it easy and cheap to distribute academic research, those works have also become far more valuable with the ability to link to other works and index selected parts of the data.

“The system has gotten out of balance,” he says. “Journal business models are going to have to stop focusing so much on … this monopoly on the right of distribution, and instead focus on the places where they do provide value.” ...

“What we’re really talking about here is control of the scholarly record,” says Mr. Abelson. “What I really hope is that some other universities will follow suit.”

From John Timmer at Ars Technica:

If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access....

Although there are some passionate advocates of open access publishing within the community of research faculty, this fight was, to an extent, going on over their heads. After all, faculty are completely reliant on both parties involved: the funding agencies pay for their work, and publishers ensure that it finds an audience. Obviously, this puts the faculty in no position to negotiate.

All of that helps explain the significance of the policy adopted by the MIT faculty....

Ann Wolpert, who directs MIT's libraries, said, "in the quest for higher profits, publishers have lost sight of the values of the academy."

Those are pretty clearly fighting words. The policy itself doesn't seem to involve any attempt to find middle ground with the publishers, as there is no grace period where journals would have exclusive access, in contrast to the NIH policy....