May 2025 update: Due to budget cuts in the Libraries, the OA articles fund has been suspended for FY26 and the funds for OA monographs have been reduced. (Note: we still have publisher OA agreements. See below for details.)

The MIT Libraries’ OA fund give MIT researchers up to $1,000 towards publication fees in peer-reviewed, open access journals.

We also support MIT authors who want to publish their monographs open access.

Get more information

MIT Libraries signed a three-year agreement (to December 2025) with AIP Publishing for MIT corresponding authors. Authors must be currently affiliated with MIT to be eligible, and articles must be published open access in a hybrid journal. The agreement includes 50, 51, 53 OA articles for each of the three years.

Workflow for corresponding authors in journals from AIP Publishing: When you submit an article, choose MIT as the institution name; then choose the option that says, “I wish to publish Open Access as part of an Institutional agreement.” This option should show MIT as having an agreement with AIP to support OA publishing. More information on the AIP site.

Questions: oaauthorpubworkflow@mit.edu

MIT Libraries subscribe to “ACS All Publications,” which means ACS members who are currently affiliated with MIT get a $250-$750 discount on ACS “AuthorChoice.” AuthorChoice makes the final published version of articles open access immediately or after 12 months. More information

The MIT Libraries has an open access agreement with ACM that allows MIT authors to make ACM articles freely available at no cost to them. Authors must be currently affiliated with MIT to be eligible.

Under the agreement, ACM will also automatically deposit the manuscripts of all MIT co-authored articles into MIT’s institutional repository, DSpace. And the agreement includes rights for computational (text or data mining) access to the ACM Digital Library. More information on the ACM site

Questions: oaauthorpubworkflow@mit.edu

MIT Libraries’ membership provides current MIT authors with a 15% discount on article processing fees for BMC journals and SpringerOpen journals. More information

MIT Libraries’ subscription to ECS Plus provides current MIT authors with free, unlimited credits to publish articles open access.

To take advantage of this, choose Open Access in the submission process:

If authors wish to have their paper published OA if accepted, they should request Open Access Publication, select the desired CC license (ECS offers CC-BY and CC-BY-NC-ND), and check the box for affiliation with an ECS Plus subscriber institution. If the paper is accepted, there will be no invoice; the system will confirm the affiliation and waive the article processing charge.

More information on publishing OA with ECS Plus (PDF from ECS)

MIT Libraries support of the journal eLife provides current MIT authors with free, unlimited publishing.

To take advantage of this, enter MIT as your institution on the submission page. Once there appears a green checkmark next to “Edit Funder/Institution,” you will see a note on the publication fee page that the fee is covered by a deal. If you miss this step, staff should catch it during eLife’s checks.

Contact the eLife editorial team with questions.

More information on publishing and peer review with eLife

MIT Libraries’ membership provides currently affiliated MIT authors with a 15% discount on article processing fees for Frontiers journals.

MIT Libraries is an institutional member of MDPI. Our membership provides current MIT authors with a 10% discount on article processing charges for MDPI journals, and discounts on book publishing charges. MDPI publishes open access journals and books in the sciences.

MIT Libraries has two open-access publishing agreements with the nonprofit publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) that allow MIT authors to publish in all PLOS titles with no publishing fees. Authors must be currently affiliated with MIT to be eligible. Questions: oaauthorpubworkflow@mit.edu

Author instructions for PLOS Biology & PLOS Medicine (from PLOS)
Author instructions for all other PLOS journals (from PLOS)

MIT Libraries’ site license provides current MIT authors with a discount on the optional open access processing fees. APCs for immediate OA are “$4,975 for corresponding authors from institutions with current-year site licenses (compared to our $5,475 regular fee)” (as of September 2022).  More information on the PNAS site

MIT Libraries’ membership provides current MIT authors with a 25% discount on article processing charges for any Royal Society journal, including their open access journal and their open access option for traditional journals called EXiS Open Choice. More information on the Royal Society site

MIT Libraries’ agreement includes full access to RSC’s journals and OA publishing with no fees for authors. Authors must be currently affiliated with MIT to be eligible. Author guide flyer from RSC (pdf)

Background on our RSC agreements: In early 2020, the MIT Libraries and the Royal Society of Chemistry extended our 2018 read & publish agreement.

Questions: oaauthorpubworkflow@mit.edu

MIT Libraries signed a three-year agreement (to December 2026) that allows MIT corresponding authors publishing in hybrid Sage journals to make their articles open access at no cost to them.

Authors must be currently affiliated with MIT to be eligible. Only hybrid OA journals are part of the agreement; those that charge subscription fees as well as fees to publish an article OA.

More information: PDF from Sage with workflow + Sage website

Questions: oaauthorpubworkflow@mit.edu

Current MIT-affiliated corresponding authors whose papers are accepted in Science Advances are eligible for a 15% discount on APCs. As the authors proceed through the payment process for the APC, there should be a pop-up for applicable discounts, one of which is the affiliation discount. The dropdown list should auto-populate with MIT or Massachusetts Institute of Technology either based the corresponding author’s affiliation or once they start typing into the free text search field. Once their institution is chosen, it should auto-populate the eligible affiliation discount.

Also: As of January 2022, MIT authors no longer need to obtain a waiver of MIT’s open access policy when publishing in Science journals.

NOTE: Nature journals are not part of this agreement. Only Springer and Palgrave journals are included.

MIT Libraries signed a four-year agreement (to December 2025) that allows MIT corresponding authors publishing in about 2,000 Springer or Palgrave journals to make their articles OA at no cost to them. The agreement includes 101, 105, 108, 112 OA articles for each of the four years.

Authors must be currently affiliated with MIT to be eligible. Not all journals are part of the agreement.

More information on the Springer site

SpringerOpen journals are not included in the Springer agreement. However: MIT Libraries’ membership provides current MIT authors with a 15% discount on article processing fees for SpringerOpen and BMC journals. More information on the Springer site

Questions: oaauthorpubworkflow@mit.edu

MIT Libraries signed a three-year agreement (to December 2027) that allows MIT corresponding authors publishing in Taylor & Francis open access & open select journals to make their articles OA at no cost to them. Authors must be currently affiliated with MIT to be eligible. Authors will be asked to select MIT from a drop-down list.

Questions: oaauthorpubworkflow@mit.edu

MIT Libraries has an agreement (to December 2027) that allows MIT corresponding authors to make primary research and review articles open access at no cost to them. Authors must be currently affiliated with MIT to be eligible. To qualify, articles must be published in either a fully open access or a hybrid journal and must have been accepted on or after 1 January 2022.  More information on the Wiley site:

• Author workflow guide for OA APC funding request submission for hybrid journals
• Author workflow guide for OA APC funding request submission for fully open access journals

Questions: oaauthorpubworkflow@mit.edu

MIT Libraries supports African Journals Online (AJOL), a non-profit index of African-published journals. The platform is home to 700 journals, two thirds of which are open access, from 39 African countries.

MIT Libraries licenses access to the Archive-IT web archiving service to manage the archiving and access to web sites from the Institute and its affiliates.

Through funding from the MIT Libraries, MIT is an institutional supporting member of this repository, which offers open access to e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. More information

MIT Libraries is a member of the Authors Alliance Partner Program. Authors Alliance creates resources to help authors understand their rights and promote policies that make knowledge and culture available and discoverable. More information

MIT Libraries supports the bioRxiv preprint repository for biology and biosciences.

MIT Libraries supports Bloomsbury’s collaborative funding initiative to make its African Studies and International Development collection of books open access. This collection consists of 20 titles. More information

MIT Libraries is a supporting member of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), a community-curated directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed books. More information

MIT Libraries is a financially supporting member of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. More information

MIT Libraries is an institutional member of Dryad, a non-profit, open data platform that focuses on data publishing and preservation. More information

MIT Libraries supports Open Engineering, a nonprofit that operates the engRxiv preprint repository.

In partnership with the Center for Research Libraries and East View, MIT Libraries is a sponsor of Global Press Archive, which will provide open access for hundreds of global newspapers as searchable online archives, covering a diverse range of languages and countries. The collections are currently under development and are not yet available.

MIT Libraries is a financially supporting member of the HathiTrust, an international community of research libraries committed to the long-term curation of and access to the cultural record. More information

The Libraries is a member of the Sustaining Circle of Invest in Open Infrastructure, which supports the adoption, implementation, and expansion of open infrastructure for research.

MIT Libraries is a contributing member of the Knowledge Futures Group, a nonprofit that builds open source technology like the publishing platform PubPub.

MIT Libraries supports Knowledge Unlatched, which coordinates a coalition of libraries that share the costs of making books and journals open access. More information

The Libraries supports making computer science and mathematics journals open access without author fees via the KOALA consortium, based in Germany.

MIT Libraries’ support contributes to Language Science Press’s ability to offer open access publishing opportunities for books and journals related to linguistics. More information

MIT Libraries supports LA Referencia, a network of repositories that provide open access to research in Latin America. More information

MIT Libraries supports the Lens Equitable Access Program, whose aim is to keep the scholarly database the Lens “inclusive, growing, open, and comprehensive.” The Lens aggregates metadata on scholarly works, patents, and biological sequences. More information

MIT Libraries supports Libraria, an open access publishing cooperative working to develop and test business models that will allow learned societies to “flip” their journals from a subscription model to an open access model without article processing fees. Libraria is currently focusing on journals in anthropology, archaeology, and neighboring fields. More information

MIT Libraries contributed $100,000 to the MIT Press initiative Direct to Open (D2O). These funds were used to encourage participation in D2O by smaller and less well-resourced institutions by subsidizing their participation.

The Libraries has previously funded the MIT Press Strong Ideas series, as well as funding an additional 5-10 scholarly OA monographs each year. A sample of titles made open through this funding include: The Mobile Workshop (Mavhunga, 2018), Resonant Games (Klopfer, 2019), Does America need more innovators? (Wisnioski, 2019).

The Libraries supports diamond open access journals (which are both free to read and publish in) via Lyrasis OACIP, a community-driven framework that enables multiple stakeholders to strategically evaluate and collectively fund open access.

The Libraries is a supporter of OASPA, whose members include an international group of scholar-led and professional publishers of books and journals, as well as infrastructure and other services. OASPA promotes best practices and equitable business models in open access publishing.

The Libraries supports the Open Book Collective, which brings together an international group of OA book publishers, open publishing service providers, and knowledge institutions.

MIT Libraries’ financial support contributes to OLH’s ability to offer open access publishing to authors without payment of publication fees. More information

The Libraries supports the Open Policy Finder (formerly Sherpa services), a curated database of journal, publisher, and funder policies where authors can check their rights to share their works online.

MIT Libraries and other Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation partner institutions are providing financial support for the Center for Open Science’s OSF Preprints, an open source platform and infrastructure.

MIT Libraries supports the Redalyc OA journals index and articles platform for works published in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain, Portugal, and other countries. More information.

The Libraries supports the Research Organization Registry (ROR), an openly available and community-run database of persistent identifiers for research organizations, akin to ORCIDs for individuals.

MIT Libraries has provided financial support for the following collections from Reveal Digital: Independent Voices, Diversity and Dissent: Civil Society in 20th Century America, and Newspapers from the Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Through collaborative institutional funding Reveal Digital digitizes and provides open access to primary source materials and publications. More information

MIT Libraries’ support helps SCOAP3 (the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) offer open access publishing opportunities for journals related to high-energy physics. More information

The MIT Libraries is a supporter of SocArxiv, the social sciences’ open archive. SocArXiv is led by a steering committee of sociologists and research library leaders, including MIT Libraries Director Chris Bourg.

The Libraries supports Taylor & Francis’s OA book publishing program, a collaborative funding pilot that aims to make 70 books open access across seven collections, including green renewable energy, climate change, women’s health, race and racism. More information.

MIT Libraries is a financially supporting member of the TRAIL Project (Technical Report Archive & Image Library), which digitizes and provides open access to U.S. government agency technical reports. More information