More Faculty Perspectives: Taking Action for Open Access To Research
Professor Wai Cheng, SAE fellow and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, spoke out against the limitations of digital rights management (DRM) technology being imposed on access to research published by the Society of Automotive Engineers. “It’s a step backwards,” he says. He felt strongly enough about the implications of DRM that he delivered a presentation to the SAE’s Publication Board meeting in April 2007, making a case that the SAE should revoke a new DRM requirement. His presentation resulted in SAE’s immediate stay in implementation of DRM for universities. Professor Cheng has written about his experience with SAE in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of the faculty newsletter. (More on this) Photo courtesy of OpenCourseWare
Professor Brian Evans, Professor of Geophysics, drafted a resolution in for MIT faculty on open access to research, under the auspices of the Faculty Committee on the Library System. The draft resolution states that “Broad dissemination and rapid, free flow of information is essential to insuring vigorous intellectual debate and efficient progress in any academic field, humanistic, engineering or scientific; is a key ingredient in providing for informed public debate of critical social problems; and is an obligation for researchers receiving public funding” and calls for MIT faculty to “support the general concept of open access, especially for publicly funded research, and recommend the use of the least restrictive copyright agreements, consistent with the academic and commercial intent under which the research was undertaken.” Professor Evans spoke about the resolution an an IAP event in January 2007.
Photo © Barry Hetherington
Professor Evans writes about the need for change in “A Failure in Communications: the Metamorphosis of Academic Publishing.” He says: “What we cannot do… is simply watch. The issues [related to changes in academic publishing] are too important for scientific and engineering research… and for the fulfillment of MIT’s core mission, to allow outside forces to decide the outcome.”
Kai von Fintel, Professor of Linguistics, and his colleague David Beaver (Univ. of Texas at Austin), launched a new open access journal in Linguistics in May 2007. Semantics & Pragmatics is designed to be “the next step in the scientific publishing revolution,” according to the editors. The goal of the new journal is to reach the widest possible audience as quickly as possible, while maintaining a formal peer-review process and allowing authors to maintain control over their own work: the journal leaves copyright ownership with the author. The editors are blogging about their experience , and von Fintel has also spoken about the origins and launch of the journal in a podcast.
Ahmed Ghoniem, Ronald C. Crane (1972) Professor of Mechanical Engineering, says “I always make an effort to retain my copyright when I publish.” He wants to be able to reuse his work — including in future publications and through OpenCourseWare. (MIT authors can work with publishers to retain rights to reuse and post their work by using the MIT amendment to standard publisher agreements.)
Professor John H. Lienhard V, Professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MIT, made his text book — the 3rd edition of A Heat Transfer Textbook — openly available on the web, with no charge to readers. This text was coauthored with Professor Lienhard’s father, John Lienhard IV, who is a professor at the University of Houston. It was published by Prentice Hall in two print editions in the 1980s, and remained in print until the mid 1990s. Professor Lienhard’s goal in making the 3rd edition openly available was to “fundamentally alter the economics of higher education.” The book has been downloaded over 150,000 times from more than 150 countries — an astounding success story that has yielded moving messages of gratitude and appreciation from around the planet.
Professor Eric von Hippel, T Wilson Professor of Management at the Sloan School of Management and Professor of Engineering Systems, has made two of his books available openly on his website at no cost to the reader: Democratizing Innovation, published in 2005 by the MIT Press, and Sources of Innovation, published in 1988 by Oxford University Press. “My whole purpose – doing all of my research – is not to get money from book royalties. That’s not my goal. I’m trying to diffuse my work and ideas, much the way MIT does with OpenCourseWare.” Sales of Sources of Innovation went up well over 70% after Professor von Hippel made the book openly downloadable, and he believes at least some of the sales of Democratizing Innovation were the result of the open access version. He says: “Readers tell me that they find it very helpful when authors add their works to the information commons. That’s really important to me.” Professor von Hippel says more about his successful experiment in a blogged interview, and in a podcast.
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