In the open
A year after the MIT Libraries began implementing the faculty’s landmark open access policy, hundreds of scholarly articles are now freely available online — and the effort to democratize access to published research is gaining momentum inside the Institute and beyond.“It looks like the policy is working extremely well, and that we are on track,” reports Richard Holton, professor of philosophy and chair of the Faculty Committee on the Library System that has been in charge of implementing the policy approved by MIT’s faculty in March 2009. Under the policy, faculty authors give MIT nonexclusive permission to disseminate their journal articles for open access through DSpace@MIT, an open-source software platform launched in 2002 to store the digital research materials of MIT faculty and researchers.Since the MIT Libraries began to implement the policy last fall, they have added more than 1,900 scholarly articles to the MIT Open Access articles collection in DSpace@MIT;...