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Category Archives: Featured Articles

MIT Professor Emeritus & Nobel Prize winner Rainer Weiss dies

MIT Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss, who shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics with two colleagues for their “decisive contributions to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detector and the observation of gravitational waves,” died on August 25 at 92. In the early 1970s, Weiss developed the idea to use sensitive antennae to measure gravitational waves — ripples in space-time that Albert Einstein predicted in his 1915 general theory of relativity — and later became a founder of the LIGO project, which operates facilities at MIT and Caltech. A decade ago, in September 2015, LIGO made the first direct measurement […]

Nobel Prize in Economics to two MIT faculty: Check out their papers in DSpace

Congratulations to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson (MIT), and James A. Robinson (U Chicago), who have won the 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for “studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” From MIT News: “The long-term research collaboration between Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson… has empirically demonstrated that democracies, which hold to the rule of law and provide individual rights, have spurred greater economic activity over the last 500 years. “‘Societies with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth […]

Open Access Week 2022: Open for Climate Justice

Open Access Week is October 24-30, and this year’s theme is Open for Climate Justice. Here are some goings-on in and around MIT related to OA and/or climate in the next week:

– October 20, 5-7 pm, DEN (Dynamic Engagement Node), 3-108: Climate Change Meet-up.
– October 25, 1-2 pm, online: Climate Justice Pub[Pub] Crawl.
– October 28, 2 pm, The Nexus, 14S-130 (Hayden Library): Open Data @ MIT.
– Ongoing (starting next week): By and About MIT display in the Hayden Library with books by MIT authors, about MIT, and/or supported by the MIT Libraries that are open access online.

Spotlight: White House releases updated public access policy

“Financial means and privileged access must never be the pre-requisite to realizing the benefits of federally funded research that all Americans deserve.” -White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP), August 25, 2022

The OSTP issued an updated policy last week that will make taxpayer-funded research immediately available – with no embargo period – for the public to access and use.

The new policy guidance strengthens a 2013 directive requiring large federal agencies to develop public access plans for the articles and data that result from their support. The guidance eliminates the optional 12-month embargo period for sharing papers in repositories and requires that data underlying research in peer-reviewed articles also be made immediately open.

Spotlight: MIT Libraries and Faculty Committee on the Library System on UC-Elsevier Deal

As a community committed to the open sharing of knowledge, we at MIT stand in solidarity with our University of California colleagues in the broad goal of advancing openness and equity in scholarly communications, and have been following their negotiations with the publishing giant Elsevier with great interest.

At MIT, we have innovated and experimented in open access models for many years.  Our experience has led us to become increasingly concerned about the implications of per-article payment models that serve as the basis for the UC–Elsevier and other agreements. 

MIT Libraries & the Royal Society of Chemistry extend open access agreement

The MIT Libraries and the Royal Society of Chemistry have signed a two-year contract extending their groundbreaking 2018 read & publish agreementthat maintains full access to the RSC’s journals and incorporates open access to MIT’s scholarly articles. The new contract aligns with MIT’s open scholarship goals in the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts, released in October 2019.