MIT’s open access policy supported by scholarly publishers

"Scholarly publishers confirm support for MIT’s open access policy – 22 Mar 2010

The faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has announced that a year after the faculty adopted a policy to open access to their scholarly articles, many scholarly publishers have confirmed their support. More than 850 articles have been added to the MIT Open Access articles collection in the MIT Libraries’ digital repository, DSpace@MIT, where they are freely available on the web.

Publishers who are supporting the MIT policy include American Economic Association, American Institute of Physics, American Mathematical Society, Beilstein-Institut, BioMed Central, Hindawi Publishing, The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), The Optical Society of America (OSA), Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the University of California Press, among others. Many of these publishers allow the MIT Libraries to capture copies of the final published PDF for deposit, so that authors do not need to take any action in order to have their articles openly accessible.

In a move aimed at broadening access to the institution’s research and scholarship, MIT faculty, in March 2009, voted to make their scholarly articles available to the public for free and open access on the web. The MIT Libraries, with the guidance of the Faculty Committee on the Library System, continue to work with MIT faculty to help further the policy’s goal of broadening access to MIT’s research and scholarship.

Search for more open access related information

Click here"

Source: Knowledgespeak Newletter 3/22/10

NIH Open Access Policy — SPARC enews

The Open Access Policy proposed by the National Institutes of Health has been made permanent.

To read more about the policy see the entry 

Here is the 1st paragraph:

"Washington, D.C. – March 12, 2009 – President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central (PMC). Full texts of the articles are made publicly available and searchable online in PMC no later than 12 months after publication in a journal."

Source: the SPARC enews which comes out monthly from The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition.

Open Access proposal at Harvard

From The Chronical of Higher Education via Patty Gaspari-Bridges, Head of the Science Libraries, Princeton University: 

February 12, 2008

 

"Harvard Faculty Adopts Open-Access Requirement

Harvard University’s faculty this evening adopted a policy that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.  Peter Suber, an open-access activist with Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group in Washington, said on his blog that the new policy makes Harvard the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications.  Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard, who proposed the policy to the faculty, said after the vote in a news release that the decision ‘should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.’  The new policy will allow faculty members to request a waiver, but otherwise they must provide an electronic form of the article to the provost’s office, which will place it in an online repository.  The policy will allow Harvard authors to publish in any journal that permits posting online after publication. According to Mr.Suber, about two-thirds of pay-access journals allow such posting in online repositories. –Lila Guterman ‘

 copyright 2008 CHE (Chronicle of Higher Education)