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. 

The MIT Libraries has negotiated two new 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.

Go here to learn more about author workflows (under “PLOS”) 

Standing by its commitment to provide equitable and open access to scholarship, MIT has ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new journals contract. Elsevier was not able to present a proposal that aligned with the principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts.

Go here to learn more about the negotiations + ways to find Elsevier articles.

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.

Looking for non-paywalled articles you can read and download no matter where you are? Here are some tips to find legal, open access versions.

The MIT Libraries, together with the MIT Committee on the Library System and the Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research, announced that it has developed a principle-based framework to guide negotiations with scholarly publishers. The framework emerges directly from the core principles for open science and open scholarship articulated in the recommendations of the Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research, which released its final report to the MIT community on Oct. 17.

The Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research has released its final recommendations, which aim to support and increase the open sharing of MIT publications, data, software, and educational materials. 

The Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research has released a set of draft recommendations that aim to support and increase the open sharing of MIT publications, data, software, and educational materials. They are available for public comment until April 17.

There will be a community forum on the recommendations on April 10, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in Room 56-114.

Learn about fair use and how to exercise your rights to reuse copyrighted works by downloading and folding your own Fair Use Kaleidocycle!  Download our foldable or remix your own!

Plan S is an initiative for open access that was launched in September 2018. It requires that, from 2020, scientific publications that result from research funded by cOAlition S members must be published in compliant open-access journals or platforms, or deposited in compliant open-access repositories. cOAlition S, a group of national research funding organizations and charitable foundations who have agreed to implement the 10 principles of Plan S in a coordinated way, has solicited public feedback on its  guidance for implementation. Harvard Library and the MIT Libraries have jointly issued the following recommendations in response.