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.

“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.

The MIT Libraries offer workshops and talks to students, admin staff, and researchers on OA and publishing topics. Please contact us if you’d like more information or to book us to speak to your group.

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.