Open Access at the MIT Press, 2023

OPEN for good

30 years of open access books journals institution

First open access textbook: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Harold

Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman

We establish the Digital Projects Lab at the MIT Press

First open access journal: Information Technology and International Development

Computational Linguistics, our longest running OA journal, makes the switch

We launch the MIT Press Direct eBook Platform and the Knowledge Futures Group (in partnership with the Media Lab)

1999

2000

2006

2009

2018

First open access book: City of Bits by William

J. Mitchell

Since the birth 1990s, the experimentation

2019

1995

2020

2021

2022

First book on PubPub: Intellectual Property Strategy by John

Palfrey

First open peer review: Works in Progress

First hybrid book series: Strong Ideas

The MIT Press releases “Mind the Gap: A Landscape Analysis of Open Source Publishing Tools and Platforms”

First flipped journal: Quantitative Science Studies

First open access overlay journal: Rapid Reviews\ COVID-19

We launch Direct to Open and MIT Open Publishing Services (MITops)

The MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies Collection publishes

Daedalus, the longrunning journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, goes open access

Direct to Open achieves publishing 80 open

First MITops project: Case Studies Series MIT Schwarzman College Computing

First born-digital book: Vision for Islamic Pasts Futures by Shahzad

First open access textbook series: Harvard Casebook

Introduction of expanded overlay journal Rapid Reviews\ Infectious Diseases

birth of the World Wide Web in the early MIT Press has been a leader in digital experimentation and open publishing

Fast forward to 2023, designated by the White House as the Year of Open Science:

• The MIT Press concludes its second full year of the Direct to Open (D2O) publishing model, harnessing the collective power of 322 libraries to support open and equitable access to 82 new scholarly books. The global impact of this program is clear: readers have accessed D2O titles more than 359,000 times in the first two years.

achieves goal, open access books

project: SERC

Series with College of Computing book: A New Pasts and Shahzad Bashir textbook Harvard Open Casebook Series expanded Reviews\ Diseases

2023

Direct to Open achieves goal, publishing 82 open access books

The Arcadia Open Access Fund is established with a $10M gift from Arcadia— $5M in outright endowment, $5M in matching commitment

Shift+OPEN program receives numerous applications to flip journals to open access

Imaging Neuroscience launches at the MIT Press when editorial board of Elsevier’s Neuroimage resigns in protest of high open access author publishing charges

• The Press’s leadership is further reflected in its award-winning journals publishing program, which now includes 14 fully open access journals, including Imaging Neuroscience, Rapid Reviews\ Infectious Diseases, the Harvard Data Science Review, the American Journal of Law and Equality, the Journal of Climate Resilience & Climate Justice, and Quantitative Science Studies.

• With a $10 million endowment gift from Arcadia, the Press launches the Arcadia Open Access Fund to support open access books and journals in science and technology, social sciences, arts, and humanities. This fund ensures that the Press will continue to lead the OA movement through the development of tools, models, and resources that make scholarship more accessible to researchers and readers around the world.

As open access gains momentum, the MIT Press will continue to lead in developing equitable, sustainable models for open publishing. Read on to learn more about our history and our plans for the future of open access.

Amy Brand, Director and Publisher, The MIT Press

Direct to Open

Launched in 2021, Direct to Open (D2O) is a sustainable and scalable open access publishing model that harnesses the collective power of libraries around the globe.

In two years, we reached:

• 322 libraries

• 10 consortia

• 160+ books

• 359K reads

Catalyzing open access publication

In April 2023, the editorial teams of Neuroimage and Neuroimage: Reports made international news when they resigned en masse in protest of high APCs (article processing charges) to start a new open science journal, Imaging Neuroscience, with the MIT Press. Embraced by the academic community, the journal signed up more than 2,000 peer reviewers and published its first six peerreviewed research articles in July.

Similarly, in 2019 the editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics resigned to start

Quantitative Science

Studies (QSS) at the MIT Press. QSS articles have been downloaded over 825K times, and the journal earned an inaugural impact factor of 6.4 in 2023.

To catalyze this movement towards affordable and equitable open access publishing, the MIT Press launched Shift+OPEN to encourage subscriptionbased journals to flip to a

Top 5 D2O books

diamond open access publishing model. The program covers the expenses of transitioning a journal to open access for a threeyear term and expert assistance in developing a sustainable funding model for the future.

Accelerating discovery and fighting misinformation

Launched in the early days of the pandemic as Rapid Reviews\COVID-19, Rapid Reviews\Infectious Diseases (RR\ID) is an open-access overlay journal that accelerates peer review of preprint research to highlight promising studies and prevent misinformation.

The editorial team uses artificial intelligence tool COVID Scholar to speedily identify relevant preprints and peer reviewers. With

over 600 reviews, RR\ ID is now the second largest overlay journal in existence and received the 2022 PROSE Award for Innovation in Journal Publishing.

Service to our communities

The MIT Open Publishing Services (MITops) program is a scholar-focused, MIT-branded hosting and publishing services operation that offers a full suite of professional publishing services, including hosting of open access content on the PubPub platform.

The inaugural MITops project, the SERC Case Studies Series from the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, will soon be joined by a MIT CSAIL anniversary report, the MIT Emerging Technology

Case Studies, and a collection of papers from the MIT community on generative AI.

A new generation of MIT Press reference works

To remain relevant in a world of ever-advancing information discovery tools, reference works require continuously updated entries, open peer review, and accessibility anywhere in the world with a click.

Building on the success of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, the forthcoming Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (OECS) will use the PubPub platform to create a shared understanding of foundational concepts and provide structure and connections across an otherwise overwhelming

QSS downloads, 2020-2023

Top open access textbooks

Essentials of Compilation

An Incremental Approach in Python*

by Jeremy G. Siek

*Also in Racket

Physically Based Rendering, fourth edition

From Theory to Implementation

by Matt Pharr, Wenzel Jakob and Greg Humphreys

array of disciplines, books, journals, and other resources.

Tackling textbooks

The average college student today spends $1200 on course materials. Thankfully, this figure is shrinking in recent years due, in part, to open access textbook initiatives.

For over 30 years, students around the world have benefitted from our computer science textbooks which are globally recognized as essential for understanding algorithms, artificial intelligence, coding, machine learning, and robotics. Open access has long been part of the ethos

Probabilistic Machine Learning

Advanced Topics

by Kevin P. Murphy

Fairness and Machine Learning

Limitations and Opportunities

by Solon Barocas, Moritz Hardt and Arvind Narayanan

of computer science, and our legacy titles with open access versions include Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1984), Reinforcement Learning (1998), How to Design Programs (2001), and Deep Learning (2016).

With grant funding from Google, we are launching

Understanding Deep Learning

by Simon J. D. Prince

a new generation of MIT Press computer science textbooks with open digital editions — complete with code examples, ancillaries, and other materials — that can be easily accessed from anywhere in the world for classroom or self-instruction.

Funding the future of open access

The Arcadia Open Access Fund supports the MIT Press’s ground-breaking efforts to publish open access books and journals and to develop tools, models, and resources that make scholarship more accessible to researchers and other readers around the world.

This fund is made possible by a gift of $10 million from Arcadia, $5 million of which is designated as a “challenge” gift to incentivize other funders by matching their support of MIT’s open publishing activities.

mitpress.mit.edu/openaccess