Scholarly Publication:

What can faculty and researchers do?

The Faculty Committee on the Library System recommends that each of you consider the following actions

If possible, submit and review papers for journals that have reasonable pricing practices. Resist assigning unlimited rights to publishers. Creative Commons provides alternatives to consider.
In addition to formal publication, consider submitting papers to digital repositories such as DSpace, MIT's institutional repository, and such discipline-based repositories as the physics preprints archive (ArXiv).
Take an interest in the business aspects of any journal you edit; if warranted, consider moving your journal to a non-commercial publisher or creating an alternative journal.
Use your membership in scholarly associations to encourage reasonable publication pricing and to discourage contracting or selling publications to commercial publishers.
Use your position on editorial boards to influence publishers to concentrate on the goal of the widest possible dissemination at reasonable prices.

From MIT Faculty Newsletter, April/May 2004

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