Yesterday MIT faculty voted unanimously to provide for full open access to all scholarly publications through an institutional repository. The implementation details remain to be finalised, but the principle is that from yesterday, all their scholarly articles will be published online, and be open to all.
As far as I can see, this does not preclude publication in other places, and it allows exceptions on application.
More details and commentary is online here:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/03/mit-adopts-university-wide-oa-mandate.html
and no doubt this will be the subject of debate elsewhere as well.
Apart from upholding the principle that scholarly work should be freely available, especially when it is supported out of the public purse, this move also addresses the problem of the disproportionate cost of print journals as part of our library budget.
Perhaps we should speed up our own institutional repository developement and be the first Irish university to adopt a similar policy?
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