MIT Libraries News

Three open access publishers, BioMed Central, Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Beilstein-Institut, are fully cooperating with the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy. MIT authors do not need to provide an amendment to the publication agreements or take any other special action in order to publish with them under the MIT policy.

These publishers make their articles available under a Creative Commons license, allowing for broad reuse.

The faculty policy, established by on March 18, 2009, makes the faculty’s scholarly articles openly available on the web. Papers are being shared via MIT’s research repository, DSpace@MIT.

To submit a paper under the policy, please send the final submitted manuscript, post peer-review, but prior to the publisher’s formatting, to oapolicysubmissions@mit.edu or upload the paper through a short web form.

To review other confirmed publisher responses, please see: Publishers and the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy. Please send any questions about publishers not yet on the page to Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant.

For more information:

MIT Faculty Open Access Policy

Details on working with the policy

Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant, x 38483

Two more society publishers have confirmed cooperation with the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy:   The American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Optical Society of America (OSA).   MIT authors do not need to provide an amendment to the AMS or OSA publication agreements or take any other special action in order to work with these publishers under the MIT policy. 

The faculty policy, established by on March 18, 2009, makes the faculty’s scholarly articles openly available on the web.  Papers are being shared via MIT’s research repository, DSpace@MIT.

To submit a paper under the policy, please send the final submitted manuscript, post peer-review, but prior to the publisher’s formatting, as an email attachment to oapolicysubmissions@mit.edu or upload a paper through a web form.

To review other confirmed publisher responses, please see: Publishers and the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy. Please send any questions about publishers not yet on the page to Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant.

For more information:

MIT Faculty Open Access Policy

Details on working with the policy

Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant, x 38483

The American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the American Vacuum Society (AVS) have confirmed that they are fully cooperating with the new MIT Faculty Open Access Policy. This policy, established by the faculty on March 18, 2009,  makes the faculty’s scholarly articles openly available on the web.  

MIT authors do not need to prepare an amendment to the AIP or AVS publication agreements or take any other special action in order to work with these publishers under the MIT policy.

To submit a paper, please send the final submitted manuscript, post peer-review, but prior to the publisher’s formatting,  as an email attachment to oapolicysubmissions@mit.edu or upload a paper through a web form.

To review other confirmed publisher responses, please see: Publishers and the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy. Publishers are being added to this web page as information becomes available.   Please send any questions about  publishers not yet on the page to Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant.

For more information:

MIT Faculty Open Access Policy

Details on working with the policy

Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant, x 38483

A new collection of scholarly articles by MIT authors is openly available to the world today through MIT’s research repository DSpace@MIT.   The launch of the “MIT Open Access Articles” collection coincides with International Open Access Week to reflect the spirit of an MIT faculty policy established in March 2009.

The policy affirms the faculty’s commitment “to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.”

The collection consists of the authors’ final submitted manuscripts.  Published versions may also appear where the publisher’s policy allows for such posting.  Both versions are identified for readers.

MIT authors are encouraged to send their papers to oapolicysubmissions@mit.edu or use a web form for inclusion in the collection.

The MIT Libraries are administering the policy under the guidance of the Faculty Committee on the Library System, and are maintaining a list of publishers who are fully cooperating with the policy.

Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant, can answer questions about publisher policies, the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, or the new collection of articles.

More Information:

Publishers’ policies as they relate to MIT’s OA policy

FAQ about the Policy

MIT’s Support for the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a national lab sponsored by the National Science Foundation, has just announced an Open Access policy that requires that all peer-reviewed research published by its scientists and staff be made publicly available online.

NCAR is the first of the NSF’s Federally Funded Research and Development Centers to adopt an OA policy.

The new policy was formalized by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), the governing body that manages NCAR.   Papers will be held in a repository called “OpenSky,” which will include all peer-reviewed studies by NCAR and UCAR researchers that are published in scientific journals.  The repository will be available to the public.

More information:

• NCAR announcement
• Peter Suber’s analysis

The MIT Faculty established a new policy on March 18, 2009 that makes their scholarly articles openly available on the web.   The Libraries have been working with the Faculty Committee on the Library System to make this process as convenient as possible for the faculty, as called for in the policy.

One key effort has been to work with publishers to ensure that MIT papers will be handled smoothly under the policy, and we are pleased to announce that the American Economic Association (AEA) has confirmed its cooperation.  MIT authors do not need to prepare an amendment to the AEA publication agreement or take any other special action in order to publish with the AEA under the MIT policy.

We anticipate that this will be the first in a series of announcements about publishers cooperating with the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy.   To track publisher responses, we are offering a new web page.  More publishers will be added to the page as information becomes available, and questions about  publishers not yet on the page may be sent to Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant.

To submit a paper under the policy, please send the final submitted manuscript, post peer-review, but prior to publisher’s formatting,  as an email attachment to oapolicysubmissions@mit.edu.

For more information:

MIT Faculty Open Access Policy

Publisher Policies

Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant

MIT joined four other universities in launching a new “Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity” on Monday September 15, 2009.    The goal of the compact, according to its author,  is to allow “the two journal publishing systems to compete on a more level playing field” by providing  “equitable support for the processing-fee business model for open-access journals.”

To support this goal, the five universities have pledged to support fees for open access publication.  Specifically, the universities commit to “the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by [their] faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.”

MIT Provost Rafael Reif reflected on the significance of the compact:  “The dissemination of research findings to the public is not merely the right of research universities: it is their obligation.   Open-access publishing promises to put more research in more hands and in more places around the world.   This is a good enough reason for universities to embrace the guiding principles of this compact.”

In addition to MIT, the other initial signatories are Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, and the University of California at Berkeley.   Other universities are encouraged to join at the compact web site.

MIT news story

Compact web site

Inside Higher Ed

PLoS article by Compact author and Harvard professor Stuart Shieber

Precedent-Setting Vote

On March 18, 2009, MIT Faculty voted unanimously to make their scholarly articles openly available, the first university-wide faculty vote of its kind anywhere. A similar policy was put into place in 2008 by the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences and then two other schools at Harvard, as well as a single school at Stanford, but MIT’s vote is unprecedented in originating with a unanimous faculty vote, and covering all of the faculty.

Under the new policy, scholarly articles will be made available for open dissemination via MIT’s DSpace, an open source, open access repository launched in 2002 following a joint research project between the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard. Hal Abelson, the Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and chair of the Ad-Hoc Faculty Committee on Open Access Publishing, which brought forth the resolution, says in an interview with Wired Science that “what’s important here is that [the policy] is giving the university a formal role in how publications happen.”

Speaking with Marisa Taylor of Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog, Professor Abelson elaborated on this point: “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 resolution changes that by creating a role in the publishing process for the faculty as a whole, not just as isolated individuals.”

This is important because publisher business models, which are built on restricted access, impede reuse and sharing of the scholarly record, in contradiction to the university’s mission of rapid dissemination of science and scholarship. Reflecting this, Bish Sinyal, Chair of the MIT Faculty and the Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning said that “the vote is a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas.”

The implementation of the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy is being overseen by the Faculty Committee on the Library System, and will evolve over the coming months.

Working with the policy

• The policy applies only to scholarly articles completed after the policy was adopted on March 18, 2009.
• To be thorough, faculty authors are encouraged to use the MIT addendum for publisher copyright agreements that reflects this policy.
• There is an opt-out option (see more)
• Procedures for submission to DSpace under this policy are still under development. For now, contact Ellen Duranceau if you have a paper you want to submit.

More Information

Text of full policy
Details on working with the policy
MIT News story

Questions may be referred to : Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant, MIT Libraries

The latest in the series of podcasts on scholarly publication and copyright is an interview with Professor JoAnne Yates, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and Deputy Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management. She speaks about the new MIT Sloan website that offers case studies, teaching videos, and other innovative instructional resources openly to anyone with access to the internet.

Professor Yates explains why MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR) is an open access site, what is innovative about its approach and content, and why it matters for business education. She reflects on the decision-making that went into offering the content openly, commenting that “the notion of giving it away to the world seemed to us the right notion,” even though some people at other business schools “wanted to know whether we were crazy” for giving this content away when other schools charge for it. She addresses this in the context of Sloan’s mission to develop “principled leaders who make a positive difference in the world,” noting that Sloan’s focus is unusual among business schools in that it includes “bettering the planet.”

The growing site will include innovative tools such as “management flight simulators” — dynamic models that demonstrate how intuitions are often wrong, and material for underserved content areas like global entrepreneurship, industry evolution, and sustainability.

Professor Yates, a member of the Ad-hoc Faculty Committee on Open Access Publishing, links the decision to make the content open access to MIT’s culture of openness and experience with OpenCourseWare. She says “I’m very proud of the fact that MIT makes all this material open to the world and that we started that [OpenCourseWare] movement… MIT… understands it owes something to the world and it tries to give back to the world. That’s something that makes many of us who work here very proud. It’s easy to want to follow in these footsteps.”

Download the audio file. (20:56 minutes; 19MB)

For more information, see the MSTIR site.

To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader: http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/

We encourage and welcome your feedback, which you may direct to:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu

The 14^th Annual LIDS Student Conference, organized by the students of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, included a panel of five MIT faculty who discussed the advantages of open access publishing, concluding that changes in traditional publishing are needed and inevitable.

Professor John N. Tsitsiklis, Clarence J LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Associate Director of LIDS, moderated the panel, and opened the discussion with a reflection on journal pricing, noting that not-for-profit journals in his field are dramatically less expensive than their for-profit counterparts.

Professor David Forney, Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering, discussed the “shocking” and “scandalous” pricing policies of commercial journal publishers, who “exploit their monopoly mercilessly.”  He believes that they are “bankrupting our libraries and impacting what else libraries can buy, including books.” Professor Forney recommended supporting professional society journals, and refusing to support commercial journals.  His personal policy is not to review for Elsevier journals.

With respect to open access, Professor Forney reported that the IEEE Information Theory Society (of which he was President in 2008) has for the past five years supported the “physics model,” in which authors are encouraged to post articles on a preprint server (arXiv) before publication, for rapid dissemination and increased visibility.  While the IEEE initially expressed some concerns about a possible impact on journal sales as a result of preprint posting, Professor Forney stated that in fact there has been “no demonstrable effect; no downside,” while the information theory section has become the most rapidly growing part of arXiv.

Professor of Mathematics Gil Strang focused on open access for books, concluding that “free textbooks will be the way.” He has made his own Calculus text available freely online.

Professor Alan V. Oppenheim, Ford Professor of Electrical Engineering, also spoke about books from the perspective of a textbook author, emphasizing that the partnership an author has with a book publisher can be win/win as long as the publisher does not act as a gatekeeper, but rather supports the author and the educational community in disseminating the work.  He speculates that publishers will follow Polaroid’s model, selling content inexpensively as Polaroid did cameras, and deriving profit from related services, rather than the core product.

Professor Kai von Fintel, Professor of Linguistics, and Associate Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, reported on his experience as co-Editor in Chief of a new open access journal in his field, Semantics & Pragmatics. The journal is sponsored by the Linguistics Society of America, University of Texas, and the MIT Libraries, and in contrast to commercial journals, has a very small budget.

They use open source software to manage the publication process, and all the work is performed pro bono except for typesetting of documents that are submitted in MSWord. This is the only real cost of publishing the journal. They perform traditional peer review, which is a feature from the traditional model that Professor von Fintel believes needs to be kept.

Professor von Fintel agrees with others on the panel that textbooks are likely to be shared freely. His textbook is currently openly available on the web, and when a publisher approached him about taking it over, he was not able to identify a single advantage that the publisher could offer him in return for publishing traditionally. Royalties for such books are not high in his field, and he’s already got the attention of the intended audience for the book. He updates the book every year, a process traditional publishers cannot support.

Professor Tsitsiklis concluded the panel by commenting that “there was not much controversy” expressed about where publishing is going and needs to go.

The panel was indeed united by common themes: the appropriateness of open access to scholarly work in cases where payment is not expected and the primary goal is the dissemination of ideas; the merits of the arXiv-style preprint server for sharing work quickly and openly; the inevitability of open access textbooks; and the advantage of inexpensive open access journal alternatives. Questions remain about the form books will take given a change in the value proposition for book publishing, and which types of books will be open access, but overall, it would seem the panel agrees with Professor Oppenheim that “traditional publishing should perish,” as “anything stagnant should.”

More information on open access publishing, see:

MIT Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing Website

More faculty voices: Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing & Copyright

or contact: Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant, MIT Libraries / efinnie@mit.edu / x38483

Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant in the MIT Libraries, will address what copyright means to you as an author, how you can assess a publisher’s copyright policies, and how you can use web-based tools that assess journal quality. Matthew VanSleet, GSC Liaison form the Libraries, will participate in the Q&A.

WHEN: Friday, November 21, 11am-12pm

WHERE: 14N-132, DIRC

The latest in the series of podcasts on scholarly publication and copyright is an interview with MacKenzie Smith, Associate Director for Technology in the MIT Libraries. MacKenzie discusses the lawsuit that Thomson Reuters, owner of the proprietary bibliographic management software EndNote, has pursued against George Mason University and the Commonwealth of Virginia in relation to their open-source tool, Zotero.

She provides an overview of the details of the claims in the case, and shares her views on the implications of the lawsuit for universities and scholars.

Download the audio file. (9:12 minutes; 8.4MB)

For more information, see MacKenzie’s blog story on this same topic.

To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader: http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/

We encourage and welcome your feedback, which you may direct to:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu

Academic software can be big business, and these days there is increasing tension between its different sources – free, open source software and commercially provided software. In the case of citation management software, that tension just grew dramatically.

To defend its market for the popular (and profitable) EndNote software to manage bibliographic citations, global publishing giant Thomson Reuters – a $30 billion company – brought a $10 million lawsuit last month against George Mason University and the Commonwealth of Virginia. The complaint claims that rival open source Zotero software (created at GMU) had ‘reverse engineered’ EndNote to provide a new feature supporting proprietary EndNote citation formats in Zotero. They also claimed trademark infringement for using the EndNote name in documentation about the new feature.

Zotero is a free, open source software add-on to the popular Firefox web browser that rivals EndNote in features and is rapidly gaining popularity among scholars. It was created by faculty at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, home of several innovative open source projects aimed at historians and other scholars as they begin to exploit new opportunities provided by the web. Zotero’s initial development was supported by non-profit foundations and government agencies, including the Mellon Foundation and the US Institute for Museum and Library Services. In just a few short years Zotero has become a serious rival to commercial citation management tools, matching them feature for feature, in part by building a global community of open source software developers who know what researchers need from these tools and can act quickly to improve the product.

The lawsuit focuses on an alleged violation of George Mason University’s site license for EndNote, known as an end user license agreement or EULA, that explicitly forbids reverse engineering the software. The claim is that Zotero project staff, while employed by George Mason University, reverse engineered EndNote to develop support for its proprietary citation formats – a major selling point for EndNote and one of its strongest features. Specifically, the complaint states that the Center for History and New Media released “a new beta version of Zotero to the general public” on July 8, and adds, “A significant and highly touted feature of the new beta version of Zotero, however, is its ability to convert – in direct violation of the License Agreement – Thomson’s 3,500 plus proprietary .ens style files within the EndNote Software into free, open source, easily distributable Zotero .csl files.” Legal analysis of the case points out that Thomson Reuters chose not to claim direct copyright or patent violation against Zotero, but that part of the complaint involves ‘destroying Thomson’s customer base’ and that it also enjoined Zotero, effectively trying to shut the project down completely. The version of Zotero in question is still a beta release and has not been made available as a production release.

Fortunately, in addition to George Mason University’s active defense of the lawsuit, the Software Freedom Law Center is representing pro bono the Zotero developers and stands ready to defend them if Thomson Reuters brings, as it has threatened to do, further litigation against Zotero or its developers.

An interesting twist to the case is that Thomson had previously encouraged EndNote users (primarily scholars) to create their own citation format style sheets for use in the software, and to share them with each other via donation back to Thomson or by posting on public web sites. But now Thomson is enforcing sole ownership of those style sheets regardless of who created them or where they’re located. In other words, unbeknownst to them EndNote users have been creating and sharing proprietary EndNote style sheets for years, but only at Thomson Reuters’ discretion (Thomson’s website changed after the lawsuit was filed to make this policy of exclusivity explicit).

The MIT community uses a variety of bibliographic citation management tools including EndNote, Zotero, RefWorks, as well as other more DIY approaches. All three products are useful to scholars, with pros and cons for different features, and all three are improving – in part because of their rivalry. Competition between commercial and open source software ultimately benefits scholars with better choices. The MIT Libraries support these tools and offer training to the community (libraries.mit.edu/bibliography), as well as developing and testing new citation services such as Citeline (citeline.mit.edu) that help scholars publish their bibliographies and reading lists on the web.

Clearly Thomson Reuters believes there is more at stake than a simple site license agreement, and is trying to stop a free, open source project that they fear could end a profitable line of business. As an advocate for the best available software for the MIT community, I can only hope that George Mason University prevails in court and continues to provide Zotero – a valuable project trying to make our work a little easier.

The full text of the complaint is available online at http://www.courthousenews.com/2008/09/17/ReutersvVirginia.pdf and the official statement from George Mason University is found at http://eagle.gmu.edu/newsroom/721/.

- MacKenzie Smith, Associate Director for Technology, MIT Libraries

Courtney Crummett, MIT Libraries’ Bioinformatics Librarian, has been featured in a recent profile by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE), a U.S. Department of Energy institute focusing on science education and research. Her profile is featured amongst other scholars in the areas of science, mathematics, engineering, and other technical fields.

Crummett came to the MIT Libraries in 2007 as part of the highly selective National Library of Medicine (NLM) fellowship program. As part of her fellowship she was involved in a variety of challenging projects that included developing a video series of bioinformatics tutorials with Countway Library, supporting outreach efforts to HST, and working on scholarly publishing issues. In September of this year she accepted the position of Bioinformatics Librarian with MIT’s Engineering and Science Libraries. Read Crummett’s profile…

Today is the first Open Access Day, a worldwide celebration of barrier-free access to scholarship and research.

As part of the celebration, the organizers of Open Access Day — SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Public Library of Science (PLoS), along with Students for FreeCulture — are offering a new video series, which presents six unique perspectives on the importance of Open Access to research.

The “Voices of Open Access” series includes one-minute interviews with a teacher, research funder, patient advocate, physician scientist, librarian, and PhD student who explain why Open Access matters to them. In a press release, Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC, says that: “This series speaks to the heart of the broad appeal of Open Access…the new opportunities it creates for everyone to benefit from the results of science and scholarship.”

More information on Open Access day 2008 — including details about live broadcasts with leading scientists and celebratory plans on more than 100 campuses in 20 countries — is available at the OA Day website.

More information about what is happening at MIT in relation to open access is available at the scholarly publishing website or by contacting:

Ellen Finnie Duranceau * Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant * MIT Libraries * efinnie@mit.edu

The latest in the series of podcasts on scholarly publication and copyright is an interview with Dr. Gari Clifford, Principal Research Scientist and Instructor in Biomedical Engineering in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology, and Engineering Manager for the Laboratory for Computational Physiology at MIT.

In the podcast, Dr. Clifford explores themes related to author rights and open access that have emerged in his experience with scholarly publishing. In particular, he explains why he prefers to publish in open access journals, what problems he sees with the journal publishing system, and his view that the choice of journal is “as important as the research itself.”

Download the audio file. (18:58 minutes)

To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader: http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/

We encourage and welcome your feedback, which you may direct to:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu

Today two of the largest providers of open source software for managing and providing access to digital content, the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons, announced plans to combine strengths to work on joint initiatives that will more closely align their organizations’ goals and better serve both open source repository communities in the coming months.

This advance comes as institutions such as universities, libraries, museums and research laboratories worldwide are focused on utilizing open source software solutions for the dissemination and preservation of scholarly, scientific, and cultural heritage digital content into the future. Making books, articles, films, music, large and small data sets, scholarly works, multi-media, learning objects and mash-ups from all parts of the globe discoverable and accessible is at the core of the DSpace and Fedora collaboration.

The collaboration is expected to benefit over 500 organizations from around the world who are currently using either DSpace (examples include MIT, Rice University, Texas Digital Library and University of Toronto) or Fedora (examples include the National Library of France, New York Public Library, Encyclopedia of Chicago and eSciDoc) open source software to create repositories for a wide variety of purposes. Read more…

The latest in the series of podcasts on scholarly publication and copyright is an interview with Dan Ariely, who was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics here at MIT, until very recently, when he moved to Duke University, where he is now James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics.

Professor Ariely recently published the best-selling book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, in which he undermines any notion we might have that humans make “rational” decisions. His book reports on his research showing that emotions, context, social norms, and related factors drive our decisions – and that we are irrational in predictable ways.

In the podcast, Professor Ariely speaks with us about how market and social norms intersect with authors’ decision-making in an evolving system of scholarly communication and publishing. He discusses reward systems, the importance of building an accessible community of knowledge, and the need to lower barriers for information sharing.

Download the audio file. (20:02 minutes)

To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader: http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/

We encourage and welcome your feedback, which you may direct to:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu

WHERE: 14N-132 (Digital Instruction Resource Center – DIRC)

WHEN: Friday, July 25, noon – 1pm

Geared for graduate students, this workshop addresses what copyright means to you as an author, how you can assess a publisher’s copyright policies, and how you can use web-based tools that assess journal quality. Open access publishing models and the use of the MIT amendment to alter standard publisher agreements will also be discussed.

Feel free to bring your lunch! Drinks and dessert will be provided.

Sponsored by the MIT Libraries.

Contact Ellen Duranceau for more information.

Full schedule of JulyAP 2008 information workshops

The faculty of the Stanford University School of Education voted unanimously “in support of greater openness in scholarly and educational endeavors,” by adopting a policy June 10 that will require all of the faculty’s scholarly articles to be available openly on the web.

This move is the first by a School of Education, and follows similar policies, aslo adopted by unanimous votes, by the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences (February) and the Harvard Law School (April).

The policy will give Stanford University a license to post the Education School faculty’s articles online at no cost to readers; as with the Harvard policies, waivers may be requested and will be granted.

The policy emerges “in recognition of [Stanford University School of Education's] responsibility to make its research and scholarship as widely and publicly available as possible” and commits the faculty to “taking advantage of new technologies to increase access to its work among scholars worldwide, educators, policymakers, and the public.”

More information:

The full text of the motion is available in Peter Suber’s blog story about the vote.

Information about what MIT Faculty are doing in support of more open access to their research outputs is available at the Scholarly Publication website.

–Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant, MIT Libraries, efinnie@mit.edu, x38483