Russ Cucina, Associate Professor at UCSF Medical Center, comments that the policy, which passed in a unanimous vote, “guarantees that scientists around the world will have access to the work done at UCSF for them to build upon.” He points to predecessors Harvard and MIT in laying the groundwork for the UCSF policy, and predicts that it will be “a model that the 9 other UC campuses will follow.”

The UCSF Policy “requires UCSF faculty to make each of their articles freely available immediately through an open-access repository” via a mechanicsm like the one established by the MIT faculty. Through their new policy, the UCSF faculty grant a license to the university, giving UCSF a “nonexclusive license to distribute any peer-reviewed articles that will also be published in scientific or medical journals.”

Cucina indicates that this new policy “may prove to be the University’s definitive response” to an endemic imbalance in the scholarly publishing market in which “the publishing companies [have] tremendous pricing power that they’ve been increasingly willing to wield.” He points to UC’s 2010 imbroglio with Nature Publishing Group, when “they proposed a 400% hike in subscription fees and UC responded by threatening a total boycott.”

The UCSF press release reports that “In the past few years, 141 universities worldwide, including Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have … created very effective blanket policies similar to the one just passed at UCSF.”

Policies modeled on the Harvard and MIT language have been put in place on many U.S. campuses, including Columbia, Duke, Emory, Oberlin, Princeton, and the University of Kansas. MIT research is made available under the MIT faculty policy through the Open Access Articles Collection in DSpace@MIT.

More Information:
UCSF press release

UCSF policy and supporting documents

FAQ about the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy

Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries / x38483

This petition follows MIT’s recent participation in the Obama Administration’s Request for Information (RFI) on public access to the results of federally funded research. In the response, MIT affirmed that public access is “of substantial significance” to MIT, because public access aligns with MIT’s mission to “generate, disseminate, and preserve knowledge,” and because:

“The ability of research universities to continue to contribute to the welfare of the nation and the interests of the states and local communities in which we reside is fundamentally connected to the open availability of the research results produced by MIT and by the country’s large and small research universities.”

This new petition will help the Obama Administration identify the priorities to act on in the next few months. If it yields 25,000 signatures in 30 days, it will be reviewed by White House staff, and considered for action.

To review or sign the petition:
Visit the We The People site

For more information:
Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries / x38483

The American Economic Association has named Amy Finkelstein winner of the 2012 John Bates Clark Medal, a prestigious annual award given to an economist under 40. Professor Finkelstein researches health insurance markets and has, among other work, analyzed the effects of Medicare and Medicaid on healthcare spending. In its announcement the AEA notes that Finkelstein’s research is “centered on some of the most important and policy-relevant issues facing developed economies today,” and calls her “one of the most accomplished applied micro-economists of her generation.”

Explore Professor Finkelstein’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

Through the MIT Libraries’ contracts, for example, Springer and Wiley give MIT authors the right “to use, with appropriate credit, figures, tables and brief excerpts … in the Authorized User’s own scientific, scholarly and educational works.”

Elsevier also allows authors similar rights. Authors can “incorporate a maximum of two (2) figures (including charts, tables, graphs and other images) from a journal article or book chapter or five (5) figures per journal volume … in academic works, research papers and scholarly publications and presentations … for non-commercial purposes.”

Elsevier, like Springer and Wiley, stipulates that the user must make appropriate credit, but also makes the point that “if a separate copyright holder is identified in such figure or the figure is a complex illustration,” for example an anatomical drawing, cartoon, map, or photograph, then permission should be sought from the publisher or copyright holder.

In general, permission should be sought if the figure, table, or illustration indicates a copyright holder other than the publisher.

If a publisher wants evidence of the permission to reuse figures, tables, or illustrations from journals published by Elsevier, Springer, or Wiley, authors can indicate permission was granted through a license signed by MIT with the publisher for access to the journals at MIT. MIT authors may point journal editors to the MIT web page describing this permission.

If you have any questions, please contact:

Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing, MIT Libraries / x38483

Earlier this month MIT and Harvard announced a partnership to launch edX, a nonprofit that will offer free online courses from both institutions. The open source platform built for MITx, announced last December, will serve as the foundation for edX. It was developed under the leadership of CSAIL director Anant Agarwal, who is the first president of edX. Agarwal is co-teaching (along with Gerald Sussman, Christopher Terman, and Piotr Mitros) the first class offered by MITx, Circuits and Electronics, which runs through early June. About 120,000 students registered for the course.

Explore Professor Agarwal’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

Tito Sierra (photo by L.Barry Hetherington)

Tito Sierra, MIT Libraries’ Associate Director for Technology, has been appointed to the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Advisory Committee for the Council on Library and Information Services (CLIR). During his two-year term, Sierra will work with five other committee members to advise the DLF director on program activities, initiatives, and strategy.

CLIR’s Digital Library Federation is a network of libraries and related agencies pioneering innovative uses of information technologies and community expertise to extend collections and services. DLF has promoted work on:

• Digital library structures, standards, preservation, and use
• Archives for electronic journals
• Aggregation services for digital collections
• Digital library services that expand access to resources for research, teaching, and learning

See the full announcement from the DLF.

CSAIL professor celebrated as outstanding woman in computer science

In April, CSAIL professor Nancy Lynch was named the Athena Lecturer, an annual award from the Association for Computing Machinery that celebrates women who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Lynch will give a talk at an ACM conference and receive a $10,000 prize from Google. “We’d certainly like to attract more attention to the success of women researchers,” said Lynch in a Boston Globe interview, “so we can get more women inspired to get into the field.”

Explore Professor Lynch’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

According to the news release, eLife’s “first aim is to publish an open-access journal for the most important discoveries that is also a platform for experimentation and showcasing innovation in research communication.” The eLife journal, focused on life and biomedical science, is intended to offer “a top-tier open-access journal covering basic biological research through to applied, translational and clinical studies.”

eLife‘s goal is to “accelerate scientific advancement by promoting modes of communication whereby new results are made available quickly, openly, and in a way that helps others to build upon them.” Toward that end, eLife plans to “make decisions quickly; deliver a fair, transparent, and supportive author experience; and create maximum potential exposure for published works.”

eLife will launch toward the end of 2012.

For more information on eLife and other open access journals:

• New York Times article about eLife
• Open Access FAQ
• Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries

New climate circulation model shows Southern Ocean’s importance

As reported in the MIT News, Oceanography professor John Marshall and colleague Kevin Speer offer an updated ocean circulation model that emphasizes the Southern Ocean’s influence on the earth’s climate and climate change. Previous research has focused on the North Atlantic, but Marshall and Speer’s recent paper, a review of past observations and research, pinpoints the water circling Antarctica as a key player in the global circulation system.

Explore Professor Marshall’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

One such issue is Elsevier’s response to the MIT Faculty Policy. As Holton reports, Elsevier’s author contract now indicates authors ‘must obtain an express waiver’ from the MIT policy, but that’s not all:

“last year they put in place a new Posting Policy, i.e., a policy governing how their authors can publish their pieces on the Web. The new Posting Policy states that in general authors are allowed to post their articles on their Websites, but then adds a caveat saying that this does not extend to repositories with ‘systematic posting mandates.’…The wording is very unclear; no one is quite sure what a “systematic posting mandate” is. …But it is clear that Elsevier is trying to do what it can to undermine [faculty open access] policies, and to confuse faculty about what they are and are not allowed to do.”

Holton points out that outrage at Elsevier’s policies has sparked a boycott, with many MIT participants. “There is a growing sense that some response is needed,” Holton says, “and the new Working Group is planning to consider what, if any, response should be made.”

Overall, Holton “hope[s] the Working Group will offer an efficient means of arriving at principled positions to take to Elsevier and other publishers.”

Members of the Open Access Working Group:

Scott Aaronson (EECS)
Hal Abelson (EECS)
Janet Conrad (ex officio, as Chair of the FCLS) (Physics)
Sasha Costanza-Chock (Writing and Humanistic Studies)
Kai von Fintel (Linguistics)
Eric von Hippel (Sloan)
Richard Holton (Chair) (Philosophy)
John Lienhard (Mechanical Engineering)
Anne Whiston Spirn (Urban Studies & Planning)
George Stephanopoulos (Chemical Engineering)

Ellen Duranceau, Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing, MIT Libraries, and staff to the Working Group.

The article, which has been accepted for publication in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, argues that Elsevier “has aggressively pushed bundling arrangements that result in libraries paying for journals they do not want and that obscure actual costs,” has “fought transparency of pricing,” and has “imposed restrictions on dissemination by authors.” For example, Cohn and co-author Douglas Arnold of University of Minnesota point out that “if your institution mandates posting the accepted author manuscript in its repository, then Elsevier stipulates that you may not–although they permit such posting when there is no mandate!”

The authors report that push-back on Elsevier’s practices has had a real impact. Following the boycott, Elsevier publicly withdrew its support for the Research Works Act (RWA), which would have prohibited the government from establishing open access mandates for research it funds. Elsevier’s withdrawal of support came just hours before its sponsors declared the bill dead. “This victory,” Arnold and Cohn note, “confirmed the boycott’s success in delivering a message where we were never able to get through before.”

In addition to reversing position on the Research Works Act, Elsevier issued a “Letter to the Mathematics Community,” announcing a “target price” for core mathematics titles, and promising to address concerns about “large discounted agreements,” as well as opening access to the archives of 14 core mathematics journals from 1995 up to four years prior to the present day. Arnold and Cohn call for “expansion to the full set of mathematical journals and the period before 1995,” as well as a “binding commitment” to the changes Elsevier has made. They also want Elsevier to “allow authors to post accepted manuscripts to any [noncommercial subject] repository, as well as to university repositories, regardless of whether there is a posting mandate,” and to include this in their publishing agreement with authors.

More broadly, the authors reflect that “it is too early to predict” what mix of publishing models will “emerge as the most successful” but that “any publisher that wants to be part of this mix must convince the community that they oversee peer review with integrity, that they aid dissemination rather than hinder it, and that they work to make high-quality mathematical literature widely available at a reasonable price.”

For more information:

• Statement of Purpose for the Elsevier boycott (signed by 34 mathematicians)
• Why Scientists are Boycotting a Publisher: Gareth Cook’s editorial in the Boston Globe
• Interview with Elsevier about the boycott, RWA, and more
• Elsevier Fact Sheet
  
• Elsevier statement in reversing support for the RWA including that they will still “continue to oppose government mandates in this area.”

or contact:
Ellen Duranceau, Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing, MIT Libraries

By the end of 2011, 60% of MIT faculty had papers deposited in the Open Access Articles Collection, making their work openly available to the world.

March 18 marked the third anniversary of the faculty’s precedent-setting policy, the first university-wide faculty policy of its kind in the United States.

For more information:

MIT Faculty Open Access Policy
MIT News Story from the time of the vote on the Policy
Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries

This news is reported as we mark the third anniversary (on March 18) of the faculty’s precedent-setting policy, the first university-wide faculty policy of its kind in the United States.

For more information:

MIT Faculty Open Access Policy
MIT News Story from the time of the vote on the Policy
Worldwide downloads of papers under the Policy
Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries

This goal is being met: downloads from the Open Access Articles Collection, which houses papers under the Policy, have been initiated from nearly every country in the world:

Only one-third of use originated in the United States, and while the top 20 countries account for 85% of the use (including China, India, the UK, Germany, and the Republic of Korea), downloads are widespread. Russia and Brazil each account for about 1% of the use. In a typical month such as December 2011, downloads were requested from all around the world, including (to name just a few) Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Botswana, Cote D’Ivoire, Croatia, Honduras, Malaysia, Malta, Nepal, Qatar, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, and Zimbabwe.

This news is reported as we mark the third anniversary (on March 18) of the faculty’s precedent-setting policy, the first university-wide faculty policy of its kind in the United States.

For more information:

MIT Faculty Open Access Policy
MIT News Story from the time of the vote on the Policy
Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries

Location: MIT Stata Center, Building 32, Rm. 155

Registration: Limited seating, please register in advance

What is fair use, and how can libraries use their fair use rights to better accomplish their missions? A new document, the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, provides powerful new insight into the ways that librarians can apply fair use principles to resolve recurring copyright challenges.

On Friday, March 23, 2012 the MIT Libraries will host an informative panel discussion with the co-facilitators of the Code, who are speaking to librarians around the country to introduce the Code and discuss how its principles can help solve local challenges and improve policies dealing with copyright and fair use.

Speakers include co-facilitators of the Code, Patricia Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media at American

Co-facilitators of the Code: Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi

University and Peter Jaszi of American University Law School, and local experts Kyle Courtney of Harvard University’s Law School and Jay Wilcoxson from the MIT Office of the General Counsel.

Local librarians are invited to join us for a discussion about the Code of Best Practices and how it can be useful in our community. To attend this free event, register online. Seating is limited so please register early.

The Code, along with supporting materials, is available for free online and hard copies will be also be available at the event.

About the Speakers:

Patricia Aufderheide is University Professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. and founder-director of the Center for Social Media there. She heads the Fair Use and Free Speech research project at the Center, in conjunction with Prof. Peter Jaszi in American University’s Washington College of Law.

Peter Jaszi teaches domestic and international copyright law, directs the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic, and writes about copyright history and theory. He is a Trustee of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., and a member of the editorial board of its journal.

Kyle Courtney is an intellectual property attorney presently working at Harvard Law School as the Head of External Resource Sharing and Faculty Research. His work at Harvard includes the formation of the first Library Copyright Working Group the creation of a “Copyright and Fair Use Tool” for use of the Harvard Library community.

Jay Wilcoxson is Counsel in MIT’s Office of the General Counsel since his arrival in August, 2007. His responsibilities include managing the Institute’s legal process and litigation and providing advice in connection with a wide variety of Institute affairs including a focus on intellectual property issues.

“I signed the petition simply because I believe that if taxpayers fund research, they should have access to the results of that research without going through a paywall,” says EECS Professor Seth Teller.

Those taxpayers would not have access to government-funded research if Elsevier has its way. Elsevier supports the Research Works Act (RWA), which would prohibit the government from requiring authors to openly share articles that result from the research it funds, thus making the existing NIH Public Access Policy, or any others like it, illegal.

For Professor Scott Aaronson, “signing this petition was a no-brainer.” He “started boycotting Elsevier and most other commercial publishers as a graduate student, because the economic model didn’t make sense” to him. “I couldn’t understand why academics were (1) donating their papers to publishers like Elsevier, (2) signing away their copyrights, (3) asking their universities’ libraries to buy *back* the papers at exorbitant, ever-increasing costs, and (4) even reviewing the papers (an onerous burden) free of charge, all while I could see for myself that the publishers were providing little or no ‘value-added,’ since most people just downloaded the papers from the arXiv or the authors’ homepages anyway.”

For Professor Aaronson, this boycott has been a long time coming. “I’ve simply been waiting for what I saw as the inevitable moment when a critical mass of academics would ‘wake up’ to the issue” that the existing publishing model, with ever-increasing prices, was “unsustainable,” he says. “Now that one of the greatest mathematicians on earth (Timothy Gowers) is spearheading the boycott movement, and dozens of other leading figures in the mathematical community have declared their support, that moment may have arrived.”

More information:

• Why Scientists are Boycotting a Publisher: Gareth Cook’s editorial in the Boston Globe
• Interview with Elsevier about the boycott, RWA, and more
• Elsevier Fact Sheet
  

or contact:
Ellen Duranceau, Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing, MIT Libraries

The boycott was launched as a result a posting by Fields medal-winning mathematician Timothy Gowers in which he railed against Elsevier’s pricing practices and support of the Research Works Act. He suggested that a public website be created where others could join him in “refus(ing) to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on.”

Such a website now exists, and lists (as of the time of this writing) eighteen members of the MIT community, including Professors Scott Aaronson, Hal Abelson, Allan Adams, Hari Balakrishnan, Richard Holton, David Karger, Gerald Sussman, and Seth Teller as well graduate students Andrew Correa, John Hess, and Yarden Katz.

Professor Kai von Fintel also signed the boycott, and recently made a similar public statement on his web site.

Elsevier is one of the publishers pushing to repeal the NIH Public Access Policy through a bill, the Research Works Act and other legislation that, as the boycott website puts it: “aim(s) to restrict the free exchange of information.”

Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries / 617.253.8483

“The AAP’s press release on the Research Works Act does not reflect the position of the MIT Press; nor, I imagine, the position of many other scholarly presses whose mission is centrally focused on broad dissemination,” says Ellen Faran, Director of the MIT Press.

Many university presses are members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and others have followed MIT Press in distancing themselves from the AAP’s action in recent days, including the University of California Press and Rockefeller University Press. Other publishers who are members of AAP have also spoken out against the bill, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Nature Publishing Group.

The Research Works Act “would forbid federal agencies to do anything that would result in the sharing of privately published research—even if that research is done with the help of taxpayer dollars—unless the publisher of the work agrees first” according to Jennifer Howard of the New York Times.

For more information:
Chronicle of Higher Ed: Who Gets to See Published Research?

New York Times: Research Bought, Then Paid For

The Guardian (UK): Academic publishers have become the enemies of science

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries / 617.253.8483

His publishing policy for book chapters is the same as for journals, but he “will consider reviewing books or book chapters that are not OA-friendly, because books are a different business from research journals,” though he “wish[es] that there was more movement towards OA books.”

As for books, Professor von Fintel will limit his publishing to books that “have a significant open access component, such as making at least the final manuscript freely available…”

Professor von Fintel has been taking action for more open access to research and scholarship for many years. In 2007, he launched an open access journal in his field, Semantics & Pragmatics, with a colleague, David Beaver. In 2009, he participated in the faculty committee that crafted the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy. He decided to post his personal open access policy publicly now because, as he tells it, “I had noticed that some of my publication and reviewing decisions were made in a rather unprincipled way that I later regretted. Having a clear personal policy will guide me towards making deliberate decisions in these matters.”

The passage of the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy makes it possible for faculty research to be shared openly on the web, von Fintel says, but a personal manifesto is still important because “faculty still have to make principled decisions such as choosing a journal that does not impose an embargo or exerts pressure to opt out of the OA Policy.”

Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries / 617 253 8483

Dr. Micah Altman

He joins MIT after 15 years in a variety of research positions at Harvard University, most recently as the Senior Research Scientist at the Institute of Quantitative Social Science, the Archival Director for the Murray Research Archive, and the Associate Director (through 2009) of the Harvard-MIT Data Center.

“Micah has deep experience in a broad range of research-oriented activities in the areas of information science, research data management, digital preservation, and scholarly communication – all areas that have great importance to the MIT Libraries,” said Wolpert.

Altman earned his undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Ethics and Political Philosophy from Brown University, and his PhD in Social Sciences from the California Institute of Technology. He was awarded a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Department of Government at Harvard University. In addition to an extensive background in quantitative social science and computer science, Altman has notable expertise in archiving, librarianship, research methods, and scholarly communication through his professional roles at Harvard. He is widely recognized for his writing and presentations on topics that are of considerable relevance to research libraries. Altman’s appointment will begin in March 2012.

SOPA is said to be drafted in a draconian manner that protects content providers while taking away reasonable “safe harbor” protections for internet site operators, with significant implications for universities and sites like Wikipedia and Facebook. The bill reportedly would shift liability for copyright piracy from the infringer to the host website and makes no provision for Fair Use.

In explaining the reason for the blackout, Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director, indicated that if passed, the legislation “would seriously damage the free and open Internet…. We believe that new proposed laws like SOPA and PIPA, and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States — don’t advance the interests of the general public.”

For more information, see:
TED talk by Clay Shirky explaining the unintended consequences of SOPA and PIPA
Wikipedia article on the legislation
SOPA Strike
Video on PROTECT IP

The GSC draft response affirms that “Open access allows all educational institutions, regardless of size or funding, to educate the next generation of scientists and engineers,” and calls for the federal government to mandate “that scholarly publications that result from federally funded research are available to the U.S. tax payers.”

The RFI, which asks for comments on 8 questions, is intended to allow “interested individuals and organizations to provide recommendations on approaches for ensuring long-term stewardship and broad public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications.” Responses to the RFI are being accepted until January 2, 2012.

More information:
RFI Details
Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries / x38483

Reclaiming copyright allows the author to make new publishing arrangements, including making the work openly available on the web.

To evaluate whether you can reclaim a copyright, or to initiate the required notice to the Copyright Office, use a form developed by Creative Commons.

For more information:

• Wording of section 203 of US copyright law
• Summary from the copyright office
• Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing, MIT Libraries / x38483

In discussions leading up to the creation of their Open Access Policy the MIT faculty expressed a commitment not only to making MIT’s research more widely available, but also to encouraging such openness at other universities.

Since the faculty policy was put in place, MIT has had conversations about open access with many other universities. A partial list includes Cornell, Duke, Georgia Tech, Indiana University, Penn State, UMass Medical, University of Barcelona, University of Kansas,
University of Michigan, University of North Texas, University of Pittsburgh, University of Washington, Washington University, Wellesley, and Yale. MIT is also participating in the new Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI).

This news is being reported in celebration of the second anniversary of the Open Access Articles Collection, which houses papers under the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, and International Open Access Week, which runs from October 24 through 28.

For more information:
MIT Faculty Open Access Policy
Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries

The collection has seen nearly 250,000 downloads since its creation.

This news is being reported in celebration of the second anniversary of the Open Access Articles Collection,
which houses papers under the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, and International Open Access Week, which runs from October 24 through 28.

For more information:
MIT Faculty Open Access Policy
Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries

The consistent growth demonstrates the faculty’s commitment to making their work available to the world.

This news is being reported in celebration of the second anniversary of the Open Access Articles Collection, which houses papers under the Policy, and International Open Access Week, which runs from October 24 through 28.

For more information:
MIT Faculty Open Access Policy
Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries

Eighty-five percent of the use is concentrated in 20 countries, but downloads in FY11 were requested from most countries in the world. For a collection that was just over 3,000 papers at the time, this wide impact is remarkable evidence of the Policy’s success in making MIT research more widely available.

This good news is being reported in celebration of the second anniversary of the Open Access Articles Collection, which contains the papers under the Policy, and International Open Access Week, which runs from October 24 through 28.

For more information:
MIT Faculty Open Access Policy
Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries

The video includes appearances by Professors Hal Abelson, Eric von Hippel, Richard Holton, and JoAnne Yates.

We are releasing the video in celebration of International Open Access Week, and the second anniversary of the launch of the Open Access Articles Collection in Dspace@MIT, where articles are made available under the faculty policy.

For further information:
Other videos & podcasts
The MIT Faculty Open Access Policy

Ellen Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing / MIT Libraries

Using data from the SSRN and other sources, Gregg Gordon’s presentation will provide a brief history of how scholarly communications have changed in recent years; discuss the need for article level metrics to help identify what we don’t know we don’t know; and outline an approach for using online communities to produce innovative results.

Mr. Gordon will reflect on how searching and accessing the right content, in the right place at the right time, has become the primary issue in our era of overabundance of scholarly research, and on the need to increase the efficient use of scholarly content and provide user-focused search tools.

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a leading multi-disciplinary online repository of working and accepted paper research in the social sciences and the humanities. The SSRN eLibrary has delivered 46 million downloads and grown to over 346,000 documents and 164,000 authors.

Ellen Duranceau, Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing, MIT Libraries / efinnie@mit.edu / 617 253 8483

The guide explains fair use and offers hints on identifying images that are available for reuse without any permission needed.

If you have questions that are not answered by the guide, please contact:

Ellen Duranceau
Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing
MIT Libraries
617.253.8483