As we mark the fifth anniversary of the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, the benefits to readers worldwide grow more apparent with each passing month. Readers regularly download MIT authored articles from DSpace@MIT from all corners of the globe:

Thirty-three percent of the access is from the United States, with heavy use from the research and population centers of China, India, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Republic of Korea, Japan, and France, in that order. But downloads are requested from all over the world — Sweden, Brazil, Poland, Israel, and Malaysia each have accounted for about 1% of the total downloads, while the several hundred downloads from each of the African nations of Sudan, Ghana, and Uganda account for about .02%, .03%, and .04% of downloads, respectively. In 2013, downloads were requested from the Federated Republic of Micronesia and Burundi for the first time, and there have been four downloads from Greenland.

The message of these downloads is clear — five years from its inception, the faculty’s goal in adopting the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy, to “disseminat[e] the fruits of [their] research and scholarship as widely as possible,” is being met.

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing, Copyright, and Licensing / MIT Libraries