MIT Libraries News

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) has confirmed that their recently adopted policy on open access repositories is fully consistent with the new MIT Faculty Open Access Policy.

The AMS, which publishes 13 journals, including the Journal of Climate and Monthly Weather Review, has just established a new policy to support the “increasing demand for institutions to provide open access to the published research being produced at that institution.” Their policy allows for the posting of the published articles into a repository like MIT’s DSpace@MIT.

Because the AMS is allowing MIT to obtain copies of their final published articles from their website, authors do not need to submit their manuscripts in order for them to appear in DSpace@MIT. This will happen automatically.

To review other confirmed publisher responses to the policy, 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 latest in the series of podcasts on scholarly publication and copyright is an interview with Craig Carter, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. He directs the Carter Research Group, which uses modeling to predict complex material behavior.

In the podcast, Professor Carter speaks about the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy from his perspective as a member of the faculty committee that put the policy forward for a faculty vote in March of 2009. Under the policy, the faculty gives MIT nonexclusive permission to make the faculty’s scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination.

He reflects on the “swiftness with which [the committee] reached consensus” about changes needed in the publishing environment, and his belief that “participation in the [policy] will help us do our job better by allowing us to freely distribute our works.”

Download the audio file. (5:32 minutes)

More information:

• Submitting a paper under the policy
• Working with the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy
• Listening to other episodes in the podcast series

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 American Physical Society (APS) has confirmed that they are fully cooperating with the new MIT Faculty Open Access Policy.

Joe Serene, APS Treasurer and Publisher, comments that “APS was among the earliest publishers to support Green Open Access, and has long allowed authors to post our published version of their papers on an institutional repository, immediately after publication. Our goals and our copyright agreement align well with the goals of the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, and we are delighted to have reached an agreement with MIT that allows authors to publish in APS journals without waivers of the MIT policy or addenda to our copyright agreement.”

Because the APS is allowing MIT to obtain copies of their final published articles from their website, authors do not need to submit their manuscripts in order for them to appear in DSpace@MIT. This will happen automatically.

To review other confirmed publisher responses to the policy, 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 Libraries are offering a new video, A Window on Fair Use, which provides an overview of US Copyright law’s Fair Use provisions.

The 9-minute video explains how you can employ the concept of “Fair Use” under US copyright law to legally reuse copyrighted content without permission from the copyright holder. It reviews the “four factor” analysis to assess whether a proposed use is likely to be a “fair use,” and offers relevant tools to support your own fair use analysis.

The tutorial also provides information on finding content that is available for flexible reuse, because it is in the public domain or offered under a creative commons license. It offers brief information on seeking permission to use for content when fair use does not apply.

For more information on Fair Use, see:

• The upcoming IAP session on “Demystifying Fair Use,” offered by the Libraries and Office of General Counsel
• The Scholarly Publishing Website’s copyright page
• Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant, MIT Libraries, x38583.

This session is for anyone who wants to know more about Fair Use, which allows for reuse of copyrighted content, whether in publications, student work, or for personal use.

Offered by an intellectual property specialist in the General Counsel’s office and the copyright contact in the MIT Libraries, the session will explain Fair Use in US copyright law, and provide an opportunity for attendees to apply the concept to real and hypothetical cases. There will be ample time for individual questions.

WHEN: Wednesday, January 27, 1 – 2:15pm

WHERE: 1-150

Contact Ellen Duranceau for more information.

Check out the MIT Libraries’ full schedule of IAP sessions.

Intended for graduated students or other interested MIT authors, 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, the new MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, and the use of the MIT amendment to alter standard publisher agreements will also be discussed.

WHEN: Tuesday, January 12, 1 – 2pm

WHERE: DIRC, 14N-132

Contact Ellen Duranceau for more information.

Check out the MIT Libraries’ full schedule of IAP sessions.

Kevin McComber, Vice President of the Graduate Student Council, was part of a delegation sponsored by the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS) that recently went to Washington to lobby for more open access to research. In this interview with Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant Ellen Duranceau, Kevin reflects on his experience in Washington.

ED: What motivated this trip, how did your group prepare for it, and what outcome did you hope for?

KM: The motivation for the trip was our membership in NAGPS, which holds “Legislative Action Days” (LAD) twice a year. NAGPS had a number of issues on its platform, so since there were three of us going from MIT (me, Alex Chan, and Alex Evans), we chose three topics to research and for which to lobby.

We prepared by deciding who would research what (I took open access, Alex Chan took the lifting of H1-B visa caps for advanced-degree holders, and Alex Evans took grad student stipend tax exemption) and then by trying to find more information about our respective topics than we thought a typical U.S. representative’s office would know.

We especially wanted to collect information about these topics from MIT or our peer institutions, as we thought that having solid examples to back our lobbying would be effective. We each wrote up our findings and shared them with the other NAGPS members lobbying in D.C. so that they could also have this research ammunition.

We didn’t really know what outcome to expect; at the very least, we were hoping to keep these topics in the minds of the people with whom we met.

ED: I understand you were lobbying for FRPAA, the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would make the research sponsored by the largest government agencies openly available on the internet within six months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal. What kind of reception did you find on Capitol Hill? What do you think is the likely future for this bill?

KM: The reception we got when we lobbied for FRPAA was universally positive. Most people asked, “So who would oppose this?” and, when we said, “Publishers,” they understood. I think everyone sees the benefits of FRPAA.

I think this bill is likely to pass this time around, due to the increasing support in academic and lobbying circles since 2006 when it was first introduced. The government just issued a request for information about it so we know there is some movement on this front.

ED: Were there any surprises?

KM: Related to FRPAA and OA, no. But we were asked to draft language for a bill to make graduate student stipends tax-exempt, which was definitely a huge surprise. We had done our research on how this could benefit the nation, and it really paid off.

ED: Lobbying in Washington seems a world away from your graduate work in Materials Science & Engineering. Were there any connections between your research and what you were talking about in Washington? What did you take away from this experience?

KM: I think the strongest connection was that I could speak confidently about these topics (especially OA and grad stipend tax exemption) because I know they would benefit the academic world. It wasn’t so much my experience in materials science but my experience in grad school and the academic lifestyle that was so helpful. I felt like we were taken very seriously because we were from MIT and because we could speak from experience on these topics.

My main take-away was how much I learned about the government and lobbying. I had always thought of lobbying as some back-room dealings and I didn’t know how legislation worked in Washington. I still don’t know as much as I should, but this was an eye-opener and I’m interested in staying involved in lobbying. I’m also continually in contact with people from SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) to stay abreast of the OA issues.

ED: What would you like the students and faculty at MIT to know about FRPAA, and your trip?

KM: About FRPAA – please support MIT’s OA policy. Submit your manuscripts and theses to DSpace@MIT. Support OA in your dealings with publishers. Making OA work at MIT will be a huge help for our advocacy efforts.

About our trip – this serious lobbying effort is a new front for the GSC; previous efforts had not been as well organized and did not have visible outcomes. Being asked to draft wording for a bill, getting a front-page article in the Tech , giving this interview…we feel like our efforts have been enhanced and they’re paying off and being recognized.

ED: If graduate students are interested in these issues, do you have recommendations for whom they should contact?

KM: Please contact the chair of the GSC’s Legislative Action Subcommittee, Alex Evans, at gsc-lasc@mit.edu. This is a new subcommittee of the GSC, started because want to institutionalize our lobbying efforts and we want a framework in which to continually improve them.

ED: Kevin, thank you so much for your leadership supporting open access to research, and for taking the time to share your experience in Washington.

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For more information about open access:
See the Open Access FAQ
Contact Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant

Inside this issue:

• Learn about new and improved places to study in Barker & Dewey Libraries

• Connect with the Libraries on your mobile phone

• Read about the Libraries’ book that traveled into space

• Discover how a generous gift from an MIT alumnus is revealing a hidden collection in the Libraries

• Learn how Rotch librarians are helping to archive and share thousands of digital architectural images

• Follow the latest Libraries exhibits, events and more

Get a PDF copy of BiblioTech or subscribe by emailing  dev-lib@mit.edu.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has confirmed its full cooperation with the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy.  President Chris Earnshaw wishes MIT success with the policy and says that the IET  “applauds” it.

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

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.

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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.

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More information:

MIT news story

Compact web site

Inside Higher Ed

PLoS article by Compact author and Harvard professor Stuart Shieber

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If you have any questions about this or the recent MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, please contact Ellen Finnie Duranceau in Scholarly Publishing & Licensing.

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.

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The other episodes in the podcast series are available on the scholarly publication website.

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