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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

> Google lets you see tons of articles online as search results

Can anyone here who works for Google tell us if all of these results are actually loadable from the Google campus? This seems likely, given how they are indexable by the search engine but are blocked to anyone else save paid subscribers.

Google could easily put a stop to this abuse by declaring that it will publicly cache anything it finds to be loadable only from its own IP range.

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.

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

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

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.

Are you considering the journal sharing databases the schools subscribe to?

The point is that even with institutional access (including interlibrary loan, shared databases, etc.), a lot of electronic information, which is readily deliverable, is not readily accessible.

On top of that, many people do not have institutional access, and are thus cut off from research results funded primarily or solely by their tax dollars. Or another way to look at it is that many "prestigious" journals will claim exclusive copyright, giving researchers the unfortunate choice between prestige and open access.

I'm still learning about this, as some people I know are pushing in the open research / open access direction.

The printing of physical journals was extremely expensive. So this was the main concern.

Also - this MIT is interesting (and good) but I doubt it would be applied everywhere. Will everyone at MIT stop publishing in IEEE journals (very restrictive about copyright)?

If those IEEE journals require that copyright be signed over to them without granting permission to the authors to make available their work, I don't see how they can publish in them.

The policy on which the MIT faculty voted allows opt-out provided the author(s) provide a reason. The new policy is a great step for MIT and the research community as a whole but still requires MIT to stand up to journals who demand exclusive rights. It will be interesting to see how much backbone MIT asserts.

It's nice that it's MIT though since they're one of the institutions with the academic weight that a journal wouldn't want to cut themselves off from the authors there.

That said, I suspect "open access" is to the traditional world what P2P is to the music industry: it's scary and presents a real threat to their livelihood.