The MIT Libraries and the Royal Society of Chemistry have signed a license agreement that incorporates elements of a traditional subscription purchase and open access to scholarly articles.
The experimental two-year agreement, known as ‘read and publish,’ is seen as an important step on the path toward making more research freely and openly available to the world.
The new agreement combines traditional subscription-based access to Royal Society of Chemistry articles for the MIT community with immediate open access to MIT-authored articles, making them freely available to all audiences at the time of publication. It is the first of its kind among North American institutions.
The agreement will run through 2019. Through the agreement, articles published in Royal Society of Chemistry journals by MIT corresponding authors during this period will be made openly available at the time of publication at no cost to the author. The aim of the offsetting agreement is that, over time, as more universities adopt this type of contract, the proportion of paywalled articles will decline and funding will shift to supporting open access to research.
In order to encourage this overall transition to open access, MIT and the Royal Society of Chemistry collaborated on significant new language in the agreement, signalling the Royal Society of Chemistry's commitment to a fully open access publishing model in the future. The agreement affirms that the current read and publish model is a ‘transitional business model whose aim is to provide a mechanism to shift over time to full open access.’ Making this successful transition to full open access will require collaborations across universities.
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