The MIT Press has received a $10 million endowment gift from Arcadia, a charitable foundation, to establish the Arcadia Open Access Fund. The fund will support the MIT Press’s efforts to publish open access books and journals in various fields, ranging from science and technology to social sciences, arts, and humanities. In addition, the fund will also aid the MIT Press in developing tools and resources that will make scholarship more accessible to researchers and other readers worldwide.
The endowment consists of a $5 million outright endowment gift and a $5 million challenge gift to incentivize other funders by matching their support of MIT’s open publishing activities. Arcadia hopes that this gift encourages others to help build a permanent endowment, which ensures free access to MIT Press’s scholarly books and journals in perpetuity and inspires other universities to follow MIT’s lead.
The MIT Press has published hundreds of scholarly books and journal articles openly, and it supports various open access funding models. In 2021, with the support of an earlier grant from Arcadia, the MIT Press established Direct to Open, a collective-action model that makes the publishing of open access monographs more sustainable through institutional partnerships.
Amy Brand, Director and Publisher of the MIT Press, expressed her gratitude to Arcadia for its generous gift. Brand said that the new endowment makes it possible for the MIT Press to build on and sustain its influential publishing programs. With enduring support for open books and journals, the MIT Press can expand public understanding of scholarship and science and democratize participation in research. MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart also expressed her appreciation for the gift, stating that the Press’s initiatives align with MIT’s broader institutional support for open access to knowledge.
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