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MIT have announced that all their scholarly articles will be freely available on their website. This latest move, in a growing US trend to improve access to scholarly material, commits all MIT's contributors to give the University non-exclusive permission to disseminate their journal articles on open access.
Professor Hal Abelson, chair of the Faculty Committee on Open Access Publishing said: "Scholarly publishing has so far been based purely on contracts between publishers and individual faculty authors. In that system, faculty members and their institutions are powerless. This (open access) resolution changes that by creating a role in the publishing process for the faculty as a whole, not just as isolated individuals."
Some schools at Harvard and Stanford Universities have already put their material on open access sites but the MIT move applies to the whole University. University libraries are likely to be major beneficiaries of this move. MIT say that their own libraries are paying three times as much on journal subscriptions now as they did in 1986.
MIT's move comes in the context of a recent decision by the US Congress that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their material 12 months after its first publication. Large funding groups such as the NIH and Wellcome Trust are keen that the research they sponsor should be more widely available in order to maximise its impact. Another component of this discussion is whether taxpayers should be charged again for accessing research when it was they who funded the original project in the first place.
MIT anticipate that potentially thousands of papers will be put onto their open access servers every year and be visible to search engines such as Google.
More at: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/open-access-0320.html |
