The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is considering adopting an all-campus open access policy to increase the sharing of its publications, educational materials, data, and software.
The Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access, which was convened by Provost Martin Schmidt in July 2017, released a set of draft recommendations on Monday which included supporting and increasing the open sharing, along with making changes to the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy to cover all school authors.
Task force members gathered input from experts across campus and beyond over the past 18 months, prior to the release of the policy recommendations.
“Our recommendations are grounded in the view that openness leads to better research,” Chris Bourg, director of the MIT Libraries and co-chair of the OA task force, said.
“They are intended to reduce barriers and provide incentives to open sharing, while remaining flexible where needed to accommodate differences across disciplines.”
The recommendations also support giving greater recognition and credit to researchers who share data and asking the university to lobby the federal government for policies and legislation that support open access to research.
The MIT community will now have the chance to offer feedback on the draft recommendations, prior to them taking effect. Community members can submit ideas via the task force idea bank, on the open publishing platform PubPub, or via email to the task force.
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