MIT faculty voted unanimously to approve a resolution that allows MIT to freely and publicly distribute research articles they write. This makes MIT the first university to commit to making its faculty’s research papers available online to the public. Though the School of Education at Stanford and several departments at Harvard have already adopted these policies, MIT is the first entire university to make this pledge.

MIT plans to create a repository to make these open access articles available online.  For more details, read the full story on MIT’s The Tech.

This is great news for anyone who reads scholarly literature (and I’m guessing  you do since you are reading an academic library blog).  As publishers have raised subscription fees to databases over the years, library budgets have been stretched to the limit.  More support for open access takes the control of scholarship from the publishers and returns it to where it belongs - the scholars.

Read more posts about open access here.