In 2022, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum to make taxpayer-funded research immediately available for the public to freely access and use. This guidance updates and strengthens a 2013 OSTP directive by eliminating the 12-month embargo on making articles and data open.  Funders including NIH, DOE, and NASA have released updated plans. Learn more about new federal funder policies.

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 […]