MIT Backs Free Access to Scientific Papers. By Alexis Madrigal,Wired, March 23, 2009. "Scientific publishing might have just reached a tipping point, thanks to a new open access policy at MIT. Following a more limited open-access mandate at Harvard, the legendary school's faculty voted last week to make all of their papers available for free on the web, the first university-wide policy of its sort. Hal Abelson, who spearheaded the effort, said that these agreements went beyond providing a repository for papers, they changed the power dynamics between scientific publishers and researchers... Many scientists and researchers have pushed for open access policies, but publishers have been reluctant to give up control of the informational resources they have. Big companies like Wiley John & Sons, The Macmillan Publishers' Nature Publishing Group, and Reed Elsevier argue that they provide valuable and expensive peer-review, and that there's no way to ensure quality without the subscription fees that they charge libraries and universities. But open access advocates say the current scientific publishing paradigm is broken because publishers control the scientific record, not academics."
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