The MIT Press launches Direct to Open

Submitted title was &quot;MIT Press has granted full access to all its journals&quot;. What&#x27;s the source for that? It&#x27;s extremely important to be accurate with this kind of thing. The discussion below is all based on assuming that that title is literally true.<p>The HN guidelines specifically ask you not to rewrite titles unless they are misleading or linkbait: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>.<p>I&#x27;ve changed the URL from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mitpressjournals.org&#x2F;action&#x2F;showPublications" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mitpressjournals.org&#x2F;action&#x2F;showPublications</a>, which doesn&#x27;t explain anything, to the press release which, although it&#x27;s a press release, sort of does. Nevertheless it&#x27;s hard to figure out what exactly is being announced here.

To MIT Press, thank you. But without an announcement, I fear that this is just a one time, brief thing.<p>Springer did this awhile ago for a weekend, not its entire catalog but many books were free to download. It was wonderful, but brief. From down thread, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mit-press-launches-direct-open" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mit-press-launches-direct-open</a><p>I think it is important for folks to recognize how hard this must have been and how many heated verbal battles were exchanged inside of MIT over this. Thank You. And thank Aaron, always a champion in spreading the world&#x27;s knowledge to the most people possible. We should empower everyone as much as we can with the bits we have available.<p>Folks should check some fun journals like<p>Computer Music Journal <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mitpressjournals.org&#x2F;loi&#x2F;comj" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mitpressjournals.org&#x2F;loi&#x2F;comj</a><p>Evolutionary Computation <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mitpressjournals.org&#x2F;loi&#x2F;evco" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mitpressjournals.org&#x2F;loi&#x2F;evco</a><p>Add your own below!

It seems slightly weird to me that university presses and learned society journals aren’t generally open access. I thought the point was to aid the university’s research. Surely it helps the name of the university to have important widely accessible journals with the university’s name on them. Maybe the presses tend to have been spun off as commercial enterprises, or maybe the university really loves the income. Or maybe they are really expensive to run for some reason. I know the press at my university has a pretty large building but I’d figured a lot of it was a warehouse. Maybe it’s full of salespeople negotiating with librarians.<p>I don’t think there’s much hope of the commercial journals owned by Elsevier or Springer opening up, but I do hope that the trend of journals flipping (where the entire editorial board resigns and forms a similarly named open access journal) will increase.<p>Perhaps another problem is that in those fields that are already closest to open access (say because they use the arxiv), there is less incentive for people to jot publish in commercial journals as everyone who matters will have already read the preprint in the arxiv.

Thinking of Aaron Swartz right now.

Lots of comments here about academic journals. This announcement is about monographs, not journals. Monographs are books. Usually small print runs, as they are niche and targeted for specific academic disciplines. The target audience is other academics and distribution is heavily through academic libraries. Think of dissertations when you’re completing a PhD.

The &#x27;full access&#x27; in the title here made me frown. Some publishers like to use that term when they let you read the article, without making the licensing open. It seems like the journals are released with a mix of true open access and read access. There is yet some way to go sadly.

That&#x27;s great! I&#x27;m glad they are doing this.<p>I can&#x27;t wait for Elsevier to follow suit. &#x2F;s

Shoulda done this on January 10th, 2013

Very cool. I followed a link to their Evolutionary Computation Journal last week and wondered why they were letting me read the articles for free - now I know why.

&gt;Reviews of &quot;Emergence of a novel SARS-CoV-2 strain in Southern California, USA&quot;<p>&gt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rapidreviewscovid19.mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;pub&#x2F;jrlok92l&#x2F;release&#x2F;3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rapidreviewscovid19.mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;pub&#x2F;jrlok92l&#x2F;re...</a><p>&gt;Reviewer 1 (Takahiko Koyama) | ◻ Reliable<p>&gt;Reviewer 2 (François Balloux) | ◻◻◻◻ Misleading<p>&gt;Reviewer 3 (Lee W Riley) | ◻◻◻◻ Misleading<p>Interesting

Monographs means books and papers right? But I can already get almost all papers on sites like arxiv or if not then on sci-hub.

Any interesting books worth checking out? Does anyone have recommendations?

How easy is it to publish your own open source journal, genuinely curious!

Aaron Schwartz, you did not die in vain. RIP.

What are some good books &#x2F; papers here ?

Were the MIT journals previously behind a paywall? Is there any info about the move?

Great now donate to the suicide prevention foundation.