Another First, as MIT Faculty Adopts 'University-Wide'; Open Access Policy
Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 03/25/2009
| Go back to the Academic Newswire for more stories |
- Policy approved unanimously
- Policy encompasses entire institution
- Distribution via DSpace
(This article first appeared in the March 24 issue of the LJ Academic Newswire.)
Another week, another new faculty open access mandate—this one coming from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). MIT becomes the latest in what is becoming a steady stream of faculty approving open access mandates, following Harvard’s groundbreaking OA mandate last year. The policy was approved unanimously at an MIT faculty meeting on Wednesday, March 18.
Unlike previous votes that applied to certain schools, or by faculty councils, such as at Boston University’s recent mandate, MIT’s policy is said to be the first mandate approved in vote by all of an institution’s faculty. The policy went into immediate effect.
In practice
Under the policy, much like Harvard’s initial mandate, faculty authors give MIT “nonexclusive permission” to disseminate their journal articles for open access through DSpace—the open-source software platform developed by the MIT Libraries and Hewlett Packard, and it gives MIT and its faculty “the right to use and share the articles for any purpose other than to make a profit.” Authors may opt out on a paper-by-paper basis.
A faculty committee will work with the MIT Libraries to oversee implementation and determine a workflow for adding articles to DSpace. Under the new open access model, MIT officials said in a release, “thousands of papers published by MIT faculty each year will be added to DSpace and made freely available on the web and accessible through search engines such as Google.”
Leadership
The MIT mandate continues the school’s leadership in projects that foster the open sharing of knowledge—including DSpace, to the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) project, launched in 2001 with the goal of making all MIT course materials available, free of charge, to anyone on the web.
“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 MIT faculty and the policy’s sponsor, computer engineer Hal Abelson. “This will allow authors to advance research and education by making their research available to the world.”
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