Tag: DSpace@MIT

Open Access Week 2017

By Katharine Dunn on October 18, 2017

Happy Open Access Week 2017!

This year we’re celebrating by offering several workshops and events and by promoting MIT’s new opt-in open access license. Announced in April, the license expands MIT’s faculty open access policy to include students, postdocs, researchers, and staff — anyone on campus who wants to hold onto rights to share and reuse their scholarly papers.

OA Week events:

Open science workshop and lunch
Friday, October 20, 12-1:30 pm, 14N-132 (DIRC)
OA Week is officially October 23-29, but we’re getting started early! Are you curious what open science is, or how it can be beneficial for science — or your career? How can you work more openly, and what resources at MIT exist to help you be an open scientist? Join the MIT Media Lab’s Kevin Moerman and the Libraries’ Phoebe Ayers and Katie Zimmerman for an exploration of these topics and more. We’ll cover what open science practices are and why working openly can help you; open access publishing; and open access resources at MIT.
Sign MIT’s new open access license and win prizes!
Tuesday, October 24, 9am – 3pm, Lobby 10
Come to our table in Lobby 10 to learn more about the new opt-in open access license, a tool you can use to legally hold onto rights to share and reuse your work. Get a t-shirt if you sign at the table. And, if you sign the license between October 23-29, you’ll be entered to win one of ten $100 gift certificates to the MIT Press Bookstore. Learn more about the license.
Wikipedia edit-a-thon
Friday, October 27, 1 – 4:30 pm, 14N-132 (DIRC)
Join us to celebrate OA by editing one of the largest open access projects – Wikipedia. Explore open access scholarship from MIT and beyond, including MIT dissertations and articles that are openly available. One source we’ll highlight is the MIT Libraries DSpace@MIT. Staff from the Libraries who are experienced Wikipedians will provide a short introduction to MIT open access resources and an overview of editing Wikipedia and will be available to answer questions. Drop in anytime during the session.
Launching next week: New OA source of articles in MIT Libraries catalog
Searching the MIT Libraries catalog for journal articles? You’ll see a new source feeding into results lists: oadoi.org. If an item has a DOI that matches one from oaDOI’s index of millions of open access full-text articles, the OA version will appear as an option. The MIT Libraries are excited to offer this new path to access scholarly content. oaDOI is a contribution to an OA infrastructure that, by taking readers to versions of articles that are not behind paywalls, supports MIT’s aim of democratizing access to information.
Underway now: Ad hoc task force on open access to MIT’s research
MIT faculty, researchers, students, and staff in MIT’s new OA task force have been meeting twice a month since late summer to review OA policies and activities at MIT and beyond and make recommendations for what else the Institute should be doing. The task force, co-chaired by MIT Libraries Director Chris Bourg and Hal Abelson, Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is expected to run at least one calendar year; its charge includes a white paper on current state of OA and a set of recommendations.

New milestones for open access policies at MIT

By Katharine Dunn on August 23, 2017

MIT has reached a new open access milestone: 46 percent of faculty members’ articles published since the OA policy passed in 2009 are now being shared in the Open Access Articles Collection of DSpace@MIT. (Last year, the number was 44 percent.)

Earlier this month, the MIT Libraries celebrated making live in DSpace the first paper to rely on rights retained under the new MIT authors’ opt-in open access license. The license was announced by MIT’s vice president for research, Maria Zuber, in April.

“Thrilled to be offering the inaugural paper,” wrote Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media in the Media Lab, in an email. Zuckerman, a professor of the practice, signed the opt-in license soon after it was announced.

After his paper appeared in the OA collection of DSpace, Zuckerman tweeted his support and asked fellow MITers to sign the open access license too. “So happy that @MIT is now offering #openaccess licenses to all community authors, not just faculty. Big, important step forward,” he wrote.

“Hey @civicMIT, @medialab and @mit_cmsw grad students — you can now archive OA versions of your pre-press works at DSpace. And you should.”

As of the end of July 2017, there were more than 25,000 articles in MIT’s OA collection — a nearly 20 percent increase over last year at that time — and users have downloaded those articles more than 8.1 million times.

Want to learn more?

Check out our latest infographic on monthly OA stats.
Visit the Open Access Article Statistics site to view download statistics, including on a global map.
Deposit a manuscript to the OA collection by logging into a form at DSpace@MIT.
Email us at oastats@mit.edu.

OA research in the news: Volkswagen emissions may increase mortality rates in Europe

By Katharine Dunn on March 16, 2017

In 2015, Volkswagen admitted to doctoring software in its diesel cars so they would pass emissions tests. The company had sold 11 million of the defective cars, which released more than four times the amount of air pollutants permitted under European law.

A recent study, coauthored by MIT researchers including Professor Steven Barrett, estimates that 1,200 people in Europe will die prematurely because of excess emissions from the 2.6 million cars sold in Germany alone.

“A natural next step for us is to focus on excess emissions by all manufacturers,” the study’s lead author, MIT AeroAstro graduate student Guillame Chossière told the New York Times. “Europe has very severe air quality issues, and enforcing standards in diesel cars should be considered as a first step toward cleaner air.”

Explore Professor Barrett’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.

OA research in the news: Using MRIs for fetal scans

By Katharine Dunn on November 2, 2016

Doctors usually check fetal development with ultrasound imaging, which can monitor a baby’s growth and show blood flow through the placenta, the organ that gives nutrients to the fetus. Researchers from MIT are collaborating with colleagues at Boston Children’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to more directly gauge the health of the placenta and other organs.

At a conference this month, the researchers presented a paper that shows a method of using MRI scans to measure chemical changes over time in organs like the placenta; an algorithm helps identify and track organs on a fetal scan, accounting for the fact that a fetus cannot sit still for MRI imaging.

Elfar Adalsteinsson, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is working on new MRI technologies for fetal imaging, and Polina Golland, also an EECS professor, is working with her group to develop software for interpreting the images.

Explore Professor Adalsteinsson’s research and Professor Golland’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

OA research in the news: MIT scientists ain’t afraid of no ghost

By Katharine Dunn on July 22, 2016

Photo: Sony Pictures

Several MIT researchers had a hand in boosting the “geek cred” of characters in this summer’s Ghostbusters reboot. Physics faculty members Janet Conrad and Lindley Winslow, along with former postdoc James Maxwell, lent expertise and props to the set — including actual books, posters, and models from Conrad’s office and “a mess of wires and magnets and lasers” from Maxwell’s lab. Winslow, who told MIT News she “probably put in too much time” working on the film, wrote a series of physics equations that appear in a classroom scene with Kristin Wiig’s character.

“They wanted it to be authentic,” Winslow told Wired magazine, “right up to the point when the ghosts show up.”

Explore Professor Conrad’s research and Professor Winslow’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

OA research in the news: Why women leave engineering

By Katharine Dunn on June 17, 2016

photo by Candace. Licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND

Studies show that engineering is the most gender-segregated of all science and technology fields, from college classes to the workplace. Explanations for this tend to focus on a lack of women mentors and career demands that are in conflict with family life.

MIT sociologist and anthropologist Susan Silbey and colleagues offer some additional explanations in a recently published study: Women engineering students can feel marginalized because of “everyday sexism” encountered during internships or team-based educational activities. In turn, women “develop less confidence that they will ‘fit’ into the culture of engineering,” the researchers write in their paper.

The researchers asked more than 40 undergraduate engineering students from four schools (including MIT) to keep monthly diaries over four years of study, and they and also conducted interviews.

Explore Professor Silbey’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

OA research in the news: A cheap, fast test for the Zika virus

By Katharine Dunn on May 13, 2016

Image: Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Researchers at MIT and other universities have developed a cheap, fast test to diagnose the Zika virus, which is spread by infected mosquitoes and is particularly dangerous to pregnant women. The test involves sensors embedded in paper that can detect a particular genetic sequence found in Zika. If the sequence is present in a person’s blood, urine, or saliva, the paper changes color within hours.

“We have a system that could be widely distributed and used in the field with low cost and very few resources,” said lead researcher James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), in a story by MIT News. Other MIT researchers involved include Lee Gehrke, the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Professor in IMES.

A Zika virus outbreak began in Brazil in 2015; most people have mild or few symptoms, so they may not realize they’ve been infected. But the virus can cause serious birth defects.

The new test could soon be used in the field. “More work and additional testing would be needed to ensure safety and efficacy before actual deployment,” said Collins. “We’re not far off.”

Explore Professor Collins’ research and Professor Gehrke’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

OA research in the news: New website turns data into knowledge

By Katharine Dunn on April 8, 2016

Data USA In 2013, federal, state, and local governments were required to make their data openly available. More than 195,000 datasets on property values, family incomes, and many other topics are now free for reuse. But how to sift through and understand it all?

A new project announced this week by the MIT Media Lab promises to turn “data into knowledge.” The project, a visualization website called Data USA, was led by Cesar Hidalgo, an associate professor in the Media Lab, who worked for over a year with the consulting firm Deloitte and programmers, economists, designers, and researchers to develop the site.

Type “Massachusetts” into the Data USA search box and the page displays options for exploring the economy, demographics, housing, and health. Under “education,” for example, you can find the percentage of degrees awarded by MIT in the state (2.6%) and see a colorful visualization of the data.

“The goal was organize and visualize data in a way that a lot of people think about it,” said Patricia Buckley, director of economic policy and analysis at Deloitte, in the New York Times.

Explore Professor Hidalgo’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009, they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.