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December 17, 2009
What Does That Make Us?
Posted by Alan Wexelblat
Big damned heroes, sir! (*)
This is old news but I just heard about it. MIT's faculty voted unanimously to put all their research papers online. That may not seem like a big deal outside of academia but let me assure you it's a huge deal inside the ivory towers. Professors can opt out if they want to - or more likely if they're forced to by publishers who want to profit off the publication and confuse dissemination with useful publication.
To my knowledge this is the first time an entire institution of higher education anywhere in the world has adopted this kind of policy and the fact that the vote was unanimous shows just how far the commercial constructions around scientific literature have drifted from the ideals of research, publication, and academic discourse that the researchers themselves hold to.
There are some times when I am really proud of my alma mater and this is one of them. Big damned heroes indeed.
(*) Firefly reference, for those wondering what the heck I'm on about.
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1. Gavin Baker on December 22, 2009 11:26 AM writes...
In terms of "first": Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences preceded MIT by a year, which was the first such policy in the U.S. (There had been earlier voluntary/non-default policies and recommendations.) MIT may have been the first university-wide policy in the U.S.
Foreign schools beat the Harvard FAS policy by a mile: Australia's Queensland University of Technology adopted such a policy in 2004, one of the earliest worldwide.
Permalink to Comment2. DrWex on December 23, 2009 9:30 AM writes...
Yes, I know that other departments at other schools have done it, but I do think MIT is the first institute-wide.
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