

MIT to make all faculty publications be open access - terpua
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/mit-to-make-all-faculty-publications-open-access.ars

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manish
This is great news for people like us. The down side is that publishers may
not publish the books, since open access will definitely going to reduce their
revenues. It will be interesting to see if MIT can do something like
announcing about the literature and hosting it. Which was being done
previously by publishers.

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katz
I don't think that publishing research as open access will affect book
publishing. The reason for the existence of commercial journals was the
printing costs and distribution. With the internet this has basically
disappeared.

Books, esp. undergraduate college texts will remain extremely profitable for
the foreseeable future.

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jeremyw
What Abelson doesn't mention is making the underlying data and runnable source
code available with each paper -- a game-changer for independent verification.

Open papers has to be won, as a first political battle, but I don't see open
data on anyone's platform.

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vabmit
I'm the person responsible for administering the server that powers this open
archive. The type of data you mention is being included in the archive when
ever possible. Further, the research group I work for has existing specific
open data efforts in multiple fields including, and beyond, computer science.
For example, today I'm working on setting up an architectural open access
archive with the staff here that will include CAD files for humans and
semantic web triple store data for search engines.

BTW, the archive system software is open source: <http://dspace.org/>

~~~
jeremyw
I couldn't find any data/code associated with non-CS papers, across a quick
sampling of US DSpace systems -- although most of the submissions seem to be
from the back catalog.

No offense to DSpace, but adequate systems for publishing open data have been
available for twenty years, i.e. an ftp site. It will require a top-of-line
mandate from institutions or journals to make it happen.

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andreyf
MIT can do this, but will others follow suit? I imagine publishers can put a
lot more pressure on the "long tail" of small univerisities and researchers to
keep their content closed than MIT.

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mechanical_fish
_I imagine publishers can put a lot more pressure on the "long tail" of small
univerisities and researchers..._

The publishers have little pressure to apply. The only reason for-profit
journals still exist is that (a) they have a big existing audience (everyone
reads _Nature_ ) and (b) they supply a seal of quality. (If you get published
in _Nature_ , people know you're a Big League Scientist and you get tenure
faster and/or get more grants.)

Point (a) is extremely fragile in the age of the Web. A journal which charges
exorbitant subscription fees is one tiny tipping point away from losing its
entire audience to a website run from a $9.95 Dreamhost account.

Point (b) will be the last stand. And this move from MIT threatens to
undermine it, because MIT manuscripts carry prestige, and any venue where they
appear gets prestige by association, and those manuscripts will no longer
appear in any exclusively-closed journals.

Meanwhile, technical book publishers have no pressure to apply at all. None of
those books make any significant money for their authors. [1] Far from
applying pressure, the publishers of scientific books must _beg and plead_ for
contributors to commit to writing chapters, and then those chapters routinely
run _years_ late, because book writing is the lowest priority on a professor's
calendar. From what I've seen, many of them end up being ghostwritten [2] by
postdocs in their spare time, and as a rule postdocs don't have a lot of spare
time. It's a miracle that we have any decent graduate textbooks at all. A lot
of fields don't, in fact.

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[1] Except for freshman-level college texts, which are a weird little
monopolistic world of their own. God, I hope MIT's rule applies to those as
well. That would be awesome.

[2] Okay, that's an exaggeration. Grad students and postdocs get credit for
co-writing books and book chapters. That's the least they deserve for doing
the majority of the work. ;)

