MIT forces the issue of open-access in scholarly publications
This a real landmark in the ‘battle’ toward opening access to scholarly works to the masses: the faculty at MIT has voted unanimously to require that any scholarly works by faculty must be open access.
Open-access journals have struggled to gain credibility against established, costly journals. While significant gains have been made in recent years, many researchers have been reluctant to publish in open-access journals due to lack of readership or prestige. Call it a ‘chicken and egg’ problem. New, open-access journals necessarily lacked prestige, and the people doing important research felt obligated to publish in well-known, more visible outlets. The NIH and other funding organizations have created funding conditions that force articles to go open-access (in many cases after a closed-access grace period), but MIT has really kicked the door in with this unequivocal requirement.
DSpace
MIT hosts their open-access articles, as do many other institutions, on DSpace. I checked out some of the sites, and the product could definitely use some design and usability improvements. It also needs some SEO help; although the links in DSpace are crawlable, they are not descriptive. I mention these things, because I hope folks will be finding scholarly works on Google, digging a little deeper into their fields of study, and maybe collaborating in a more efficient way. Last, but certainly not least, DSpace needs some RSS feeds. I should be able to subscribe to any department at any institution that is using DSpace.
Let the information revolution continue. Thanks MIT!
