MIT Announces a New Open Access Policy For All MIT Authors

From MIT News/MIT Libraries:

“Thanks to the efforts of Cara Manning PhD ’16, the MIT Libraries, and many others across the Institute, MIT is launching a new way for authors of scholarly articles to legally hold onto rights to reuse and post their articles, and for others to more easily build on that work.
As of this month, all MIT authors, including students, postdocs, and staff, can opt in to an open access license.”
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MIT has a long and proud history of making our research and teaching available to a broad, global community of potential learners and scholars,” says Chris Bourg, director of the MIT Libraries. “We’re committed to open access because global access to knowledge is good for science, it is good for the advancement of knowledge and our understanding of the world, and it will accelerate our collective ability to solve the world’s grand challenges.”
Publishing rights are something scholarly researchers cannot take for granted. The high-profile chemistry journal that Manning and her coauthors chose to publish their article, for example, was typical of academic journals in that it required they sign over their copyright. In doing so, the authors lost rights to use their work, except in ways prescribed by the publisher. The MIT Faculty Open Access Policy would have neatly accommodated this problem, but it applies only to MIT faculty or their coauthors. Manning was neither.
Frustrated, she approached the MIT Libraries, which implements the faculty open access policy, and asked: How can we make an open access policy that applies to students? The answer was far from simple.

What happened? Read the Complete Article

Filed under: Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing