MIT authors therefore do not need to provide an amendment to the IET publication agreement or take any other special action in order to publish with IET  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 upload the final submitted manuscript, post peer-review, but prior to the publisher’s formatting, through a short web form, or send to oa@mit.edu.

To review other confirmed publisher responses, please see: Publishers and the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy. Questions about publishers not yet on the page may be directed 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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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 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

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

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

WHERE: 14N-132, DIRC

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

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

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…

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

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

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…

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

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

As reported in the Harvard Law School news, Dean of the Law School Elena Kagan explains the motivation of the vote as a “decision to embrace ‘open access’” that “means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the Law School.”

“The acceptance of open access ensures that our faculty’s world-class scholarship is accessible today and into the future,” reports John Palfrey, the Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and Vice Dean of library and information resources, in the same news story.

This vote follows that of the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences, which adopted a similar mandate in February 2008, also by a unanimous vote.

For more information, see stories in:

Harvard Law School news

Peter Suber’s Open Access News

And, for summaries of what MIT faculty are saying and doing in relation to open access, see:

Podcasts with MIT Faculty on Scholarly Publishing and Open Access

MIT Faculty taking action for open access

–Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / efinnie@mit.edu / x8483

Professor Stiny explains the significance of copying in the design process from his unusual perspective – a perspective that blends art and design with calculating. Professor Stiny invented shape grammars – the idea of identifying and quantifying a set of rules that can generate an infinite range of designs, much the way rules of grammar in language can generate an infinite range of sentences. His work uses mathematics to capture the creative, generative language of shapes and design.

Download the audio file. (14:42 minutes; 13.5 MB)

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

The 2008 contest theme is “MindMashup: The Value of Information Sharing.” Videos of two minutes or less that “imaginatively portray the benefits of the open, legal exchange of information” are due by November 30, 2008.   The winner receives a $1000 cash award.

The Sparky Awards are sponsored by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) with additional co- sponsorship by the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, Penn Libraries (at the University of Pennsylvania), Students for Free Culture, and The Student PIRGs.

For more information see:

Details about this year’s contest.

Last year’s winning entries.

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

This policy, created to conform with a new law passed by Congress, applies to all peer-reviewed articles accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008, if they arise, in whole or in part, from direct costs funded by NIH.

The MIT Libraries have developed a step-by-step guide for MIT authors who need to comply with this policy.   In addition, the MIT Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant is available to assist MIT authors in complying with it. 

For more information, please contact:

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu / 617.253.8483

Professor Abelson has played key roles in fostering educational technology initiatives such MIT’s OpenCourseWare and DSpace. He has a broad interest in information technology and policy,  and developed and teaches the course “Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier.”  He was a founding director of Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the Free Software Foundation, organizations that are devoted to strengthening our intellectual commons.

In the podcast, Professor Abelson reflects on the origins and impacts of these efforts, his reasons for remaining committed to more open access to research, and the concerns he has about the future.

Download the audio file. (22:53 minutes; 21 MB)

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

Last spring, the MIT Libraries cancelled their web access to the (SAE) technical papers, because the society was imposing a DRM plug-in called FileOpen that seriously impeded normal scholarly use.

Professor of Mechanical Engineering and SAE fellow Wai Cheng presented MIT’s concerns at the SAE’s Publication Board meeting in April 2007, which resulted in an immediate stay of DRM implementation on university campuses, and ultimately (November 2007) in a changed policy: FileOpen would not be required for university access to the SAE Digital Library.

While the MIT Libraries have not been able to get all the assurances we would like regarding SAE’s plans for implementing other DRM tools in the future, after consulting with faculty we have decided, as Professor Cheng put it, to “work with SAE in good faith,” reentering what we hope will be a productive partnership.

Access to SAE technical papers (requires MIT certificates on and off campus).

Details about access to SAE technical papers

If you have comments or questions, please contact:

Tracy Gabridge, Co-Head, Engineering & Science Libraries, tag@mit.edu

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

Columbia University Press has recently made Gutenberg-e open-access, making these books freely available to the general public. Visit http://www.gutenberg-e.org/ to see titles such as Sarah Lowengard’s The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe; Maria Rentetzi’s Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early 20th Century Vienna; and Sherry Fields’ Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico.

The 51-minute video captures a session for graduate students that covers:

• use of web-based tools that assess journal quality;
• copyright and its relation to the publication process;
• assessing a publisher’s copyright policies;
• open access publishing models and channels, and impact on citation rate;
• use of the MIT amendment to alter standard publisher agreements.

The video is linked from the student page on the scholarly publishing website .

If you have any feedback or questions, please direct to

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

Professor Lienhard’s research interests include Heat and Mass Transfer and Fluid Mechanics, among other areas. He is the recipient of several teaching awards at MIT as well as research awards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

He speaks about making his text book — the 3rd edition of A Heat Transfer Textbook — openly available on the web, with no charge to readers. This text was coauthored with Professor Lienhard’s father, John Lienhard IV, who is a professor at the University of Houston. It was published by Prentice Hall in two print editions in the 1980s, and remained in print until the mid 1990s.

In the podcast, Professor Lienhard, whose goal was to “explore the impact that free textbooks could have on higher education,” reflects on how the project came about and what it has meant to those who have downloaded the text, as well as to him.

Download the audio file. (15:10 minutes; 11.1 MB)

Beyond the podcast: More about A Heat Transfer Textbook

Professor Lienhard’s experiment was a remarkable innovation at the time. Certainly its astounding success could not have been foreseen back in 2001, when he and his father launched the open access version. That was before ebooks were widespread, before OpenCourseWare had made the idea of freely accessible educational materials a hot topic, and when internet connections were still slow enough that it took quite a commitment to download the 8 – 10 MB book. Yet the downloads built quickly and the rate has not let up.

One of the unexpected outcomes of this experiment with open textbook publishing was that the freely downloadable 3rd edition reached a completely different and much larger audience than the first two print editions had. The Prentice Hall editions were not marketed internationally, and the buyers were largely American college students, and American college professors. Professor Lienhard estimates that the sales were perhaps 10,000 for each of the first two print editions, a very respectable number for a printed textbook.

In contrast, the open access version has been downloaded more than 150,000 times from more than 150 countries — so the scale of the audience has increased by an order of magnitude. The recipients of the open access version are not primarily American students or professors; they are practicing engineers in the U.S. and elsewhere, and, to an overwhelming extent, students in the developing world who have little to no access to quality textbooks in engineering and science. Professor Lienhard discusses the moving testimonials he’s received from these students in the podcast.