For nearly three decades, the MIT Press has been driven by a fundamental question: How can we make scholarship more open, inclusive, and accessible? And this mission has never felt more imperative than in 2023, a year designated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as the Year of Open Science.
The Press recently concluded its second full year of the Direct to Open (D2O) publishing model, harnessing the collective power of 322 libraries to support open and equitable access to 82 new scholarly books. The global impact of this program is clear: readers across the globe have accessed D2O titles 328,000 times.
The Press’s leadership is further reflected in its award-winning open access (OA) journals publishing program. In April 2023, the editorial teams of Neuroimage and Neuroimage: Reports made international news when they resigned en masse to start a new open science journal, Imaging Neuroscience, with the MIT Press. Embraced by the academic community, the journal signed up more than 2,000 peer reviewers and published its first six peer-reviewed research articles in July.
Last spring, with a $10 million endowment gift from Arcadia, the Press launched the Arcadia Open Access Fund to support OA books and journals in science and technology, social sciences, arts, and humanities. This fund ensures that the Press will continue to lead the OA movement through the development of tools, models, and resources that make scholarship more accessible to researchers and readers around the world. Learn more about the Press’s OA initiatives at mitpress.mit.edu/openaccess.