This is amazing. I know folks battling for Open Access in science for over 10 years. Even with heavy hitters, such as Harold Varmus, PubMed, and others supporting Open Access, status quo still dominates the science publishing industry.
Now, Peter Suber reports that the MIT faculty has voted unanimously to give the university nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license for all scholarly articles, which the university will then make available through an Open Access directory.
Might this be the tipping point for Open Access? As I see newspapers sinking while holding onto their 20th century biz models, might the big science paper publishers wake up to this change in their world (ten years coming, mind you).*
I’ll be giving a talk next week about the future of publishing. Let’s see what folks say.
[via @perryhewitt] Peter Suber, Open Access News:
Hal Abelson’s [MIT faculty member] ‘comments:
I chaired the committee that drafted the resolution and led faculty discussions on it throughout the fall. So I’m particularly gratified that the vote was unanimously in favor. In the words of MIT Faculty Chair Bish Sanyal, the vote is “a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas.”
*BioMedCentral showed that even the old model could work in Open Access, such that they got bought out by Springer.
