

MIT adopts a university-wide Open Access mandate - carlosrr
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/03/mit-adopts-university-wide-oa-mandate.html

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mechanical_fish
Words cannot describe how happy this makes me. My pet peeve is being
addressed!

I dream of the day when I can learn science, as a non-university-affiliated
citizen, by simply surfing from primary reference to primary reference via
inline links.

~~~
MikeCapone
I'm also extremely happy, especially since just today I watched a Walter Lewin
physics lecture from MIT's OpenCourseWare, and a History lecture from Yale via
Academic Earth.

The more people can read primary sources for free, watch lectures online, etc,
the better off this civilization will be.

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dantheman
I think this is great. During orientation they discuss how to amend copyright
agreements so that you retain the rights to publish your papers on your
website etc. I'm glad they are making it official.

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sketerpot
It's great that they're doing this, but I wonder: what is causing this sudden
swing toward openness? Have they always wanted to open their research, but
just never been able to do so economically until the Internet came along?

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RK
I think it might be in part due to the frustration caused by now ubiquitous
availability of articles, but large barriers to actually access those
articles. Google lets you see tons of articles online as search results, but
even institutional access generally will not allow you to see everything out
there due to subscription budget constraints. I'm sure even a place like
Harvard doesn't subscribe to every issue of every online journal.

~~~
rms
At Pitt I can go to the library's website and request journals they don't have
access to, I get an email the next day with a .pdf of the journal article
requested.

~~~
sketerpot
That sounds like a lot of rigamarole for a paper that might not even be worth
reading.

~~~
rms
It's not that much harder than having to VPN into the university in the first
place.

~~~
sketerpot
You can automate the VPN'ing. Or, in my case, I just use an on-campus computer
which doesn't need to VPN. What you can't automate away into instantaneousness
is the delay of waiting a day for a paper to get there.

