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The MIT Press launches Direct to Open
- jorgBaller 6y agoI am a shareholder of MIT Press and i am going to sue them
- mav3rick 6y agoWhat are some good books / papers here ?
- redofrac 6y agoWere the MIT journals previously behind a paywall? Is there any info about the move?
- DetroitThrow 6y agoI had thought MIT press journals were open for a long time, yes? This seems quite notable though: https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/mit-press-launches-direct-open https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/mit-press-launches-direct-open
- tokai 6y agoThat link is about monographs not journals.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoThinking of Aaron Swartz right now.
- hammock 6y ago.
- mav3rick 6y agoWe should call this Aaron Swartz day
- input_sh 6y agoThere already is an Aaron Swartz day on November 8th (date of his birthday). There are international hackathons organised in his memory: https://www.aaronswartzday.org/ https://www.aaronswartzday.org/
- cyberlurker 6y agoI think this will be on a lot of people’s minds. Is there any official connection? The link just takes me to the library.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoI hope there is a link. Aaron did not die in vain, his ideas and spirit live on.
- quesera 6y agoI really dislike this take. For that to make sense to me, I'd have to believe that Aaron died for his beliefs, or that his death caused others to take up his fight. I don't believe either of these things are true. Aaron died because he took his own life in the face of an overwhelming situation at the hands of a cruel system. Aaron's death did not further his cause. It was just a tragic combination of humans and inhuman actions. Aaron was not a martyr. He was an idealistic but troubled good person who got ground up by forces he did not understand, and should never have had to learn. It's a loss. His ideas and spirit live on in others, yes. But his death was not required or helpful, and he did not die for his cause. It was a senseless tragedy, but merely adjacent to his beliefs. Do the work. Miss Aaron. Be inspired by him. But I don't believe he died in the service of something larger than himself. I think that take diminishes the real tragedy here, which is that humans like Aaron are sometimes victims of the systems that we create.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoI think about Aaron every time I read any journal, especially if I hit a paywall.
- quesera 6y agoI do too. Every single time.
- abhinav22 6y ago
- joshuakelly 6y agoMe too. Thank you Aaron.
- samstave 6y agoNOPE - He was after the proof that Pedos and Sadists were on roster - not stupid tech data... That is why he was killed.
- colejohnson66 6y agoI’ve never heard this?
- samstave 6y agoMost havent but its true. There is an ep of Joe Rogan, and I think it was Lex Friedman (could be wrong) and he was talking about the debauchery at MIT... Then remember that such luminaries as Minsky and Derschowitz were on not only that roster but the plane, multiple times. The claim was that BDSM was HUGE in MIT and then recall that /u/spez was head of the /r/cannibals and talking openly about eating babies etc... Then look at the past of SV insiderers in the underground (literally) sex clubs in SF (cant reveal my sources on that - but yeah - there are a lot of debaucherously inclined folked in SV/SF - I know first hand) So yeah... EDIT - This post was marked -4 and [FLAGGED] EVEN AT THE FUCKING TIME OF POSTING IT. WTF @DANG How is a post auto -4 and [FLAGGED] at the time of posting you asshole???
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dangwu 6y agoRelevant HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5046845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5046845
- RapidFire 6y agoI read his story. What a terrible miscarriage of justice.
- pratio 6y agoMe too, the first thing flashed in my head.
- xbar 6y agoSame. RIP Aaaron Swartz.
- whiskeytuesday 6y agoNot an academician but it seems to this layman technologist like maybe a step towards the long awaited apology for Aaron.
- macg333 6y agoThat's great! I'm glad they are doing this. I can't wait for Elsevier to follow suit. /s
- teruakohatu 6y agoWe need Elsevier's revenue to decrease enough so that some benevolent billionaire can buy it and make everything open access. Elsevier's has plenty of ways to reinvent itself make money. Scopus is a good search engine and libraries would be wiling to pay for it unbundled from journal access.
- lostlogin 6y agoIsn’t this a regulation problem? So much stuff that is funded with government money (partially or fully) ends up pay walled. Can’t governments regulate to stop that?
- unishark 6y agoThe US govt already requires publicly funded publications be shared publicly. Some agencies like NIH and DoD have their own archives you need to put the article in. The law allows up to something like a limit of one year paywalling.
- bitwize 6y agoYou can't spell Elsevier without E-V-I-L.
- joseluis 6y agonor LIVE, for that matter
- chovybizzass 6y agoGreat now donate to the suicide prevention foundation.
- qbasic_forever 6y ago...and anti-human trafficking foundations too.
- yikesshescute 6y agoAm I supposed to believe that “donating to the suicide prevention foundation” has something to do with stopping future suicides? Because I don’t see why I should jump to that conclusion.
- khazhoux 6y agoIt shouldn't be a far mental leap, though. There are people who work in suicide prevention (hotlines, counseling, awareness + outreach, etc) and their employment and operations requires funding. Unless one believes that all efforts to prevent suicide are entirely futile...?
- yikesshescute 6y ago> Unless one believes that all efforts to prevent suicide are entirely futile...? I don’t even need to think that. I can just think that it’s “hard” to differentiate between organizations that are “good” at stopping suicides and those that are “bad” at it. Or, I might think that state of the art suicide prevention is prohibitively expensive, eg maybe it costs on average $1,000,000 to stop a single suicide.
- khazhoux 6y agoSorry, but I don't understand your original comment. The person above you suggested a donation, because obviously this thread has HN readers thinking about how to prevent suicides (if you don't understand why, you may research Aaron Swartz). A donation is a common way for people who care about an issue, to indirectly have some effect on it -- by empowering others who directly devote time to it. Certainly, one may choose to research the institutions they donate to, if they don't trust them by name. That is not unique to suicide prevention, therefore it's an unnecessary qualifier in the current discussion. Likewise, perhaps it's expensive. But even a single ad that reaches someone in need, leading to that person seeking professional help, is something.
- sitkack 6y agoTo MIT Press, thank you. But without an announcement, I fear that this is just a one time, brief thing. Springer did this awhile ago for a weekend, not its entire catalog but many books were free to download. It was wonderful, but brief. From down thread, https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/mit-press-launches-direct-open https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/mit-press-launches-direct-open I think it is important for folks to recognize how hard this must have been and how many heated verbal battles were exchanged inside of MIT over this. Thank You. And thank Aaron, always a champion in spreading the world's knowledge to the most people possible. We should empower everyone as much as we can with the bits we have available. Folks should check some fun journals like Computer Music Journal https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/comj https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/comj Evolutionary Computation https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/evco https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/evco Add your own below!
- annoyingnoob 6y agohttps://openbehavioralscience.org/manifesto/ https://openbehavioralscience.org/manifesto/
- amatecha 6y agoAh man I forgot about Computer Music Journal, thanks! I got a copy of one issue from a colleague some years ago and it had lots of interesting stuff. Guess now I can get a digital copy (among the rest of the back-catalogue), haha :)
- sixtyfourbits 6y agoThe ACM did this with their digital library to support people during working/studying remotely during COVID but seemingly had a change of heart and put the paywall back up a short while after receiving all the positive publicity despite the pandemic still interfering with education and work habits. Fortunately someone managed to scrape the entire thing and there's a 500Gb torrent out there with the full content of all the journals and conference proceedings.
- dan-robertson 6y agoIt seems slightly weird to me that university presses and learned society journals aren’t generally open access. I thought the point was to aid the university’s research. Surely it helps the name of the university to have important widely accessible journals with the university’s name on them. Maybe the presses tend to have been spun off as commercial enterprises, or maybe the university really loves the income. Or maybe they are really expensive to run for some reason. I know the press at my university has a pretty large building but I’d figured a lot of it was a warehouse. Maybe it’s full of salespeople negotiating with librarians. I don’t think there’s much hope of the commercial journals owned by Elsevier or Springer opening up, but I do hope that the trend of journals flipping (where the entire editorial board resigns and forms a similarly named open access journal) will increase. Perhaps another problem is that in those fields that are already closest to open access (say because they use the arxiv), there is less incentive for people to jot publish in commercial journals as everyone who matters will have already read the preprint in the arxiv.
- azinman2 6y ago“Or maybe they are really expensive to run for some reason” That reason is people. Journals don’t just create themselves. Lots more happens to make it so than just having an email inbox to accept submissions. You need to be able to fund the enterprise, and often you want bigger/popular journals to subsidize the really esoteric stuff that’s important intellectually to humanity but still requires a base number of people to run it independent of the sales. It would also be nice for these people to make real money for their time so people who are good at it could make a career of it. Elsiver etc are a different beast as they’re companies disconnected from a larger university. So their self-preservation goals are quite different, and accordingly, their appetite for organizational profit versus covering expenses.
- dan-robertson 6y agoI know of open access journals which are run very cheaply. Basically they need web hosting, a web site, and some hosting of papers. There are even arxiv overlay journals which host the papers on the arxiv. Obviously they can be more expensive if papers are printed and distributed. I don’t know about other fields but in mathematics the editors and reviewers are not paid (and I think this is the norm in science but not sure about medicine. I think sometimes the chief editor gets some relatively small payment). But it seems to me that these are the most valuable parts of the journal. So where is all the money going? The journals don’t do copy-editing (anymore?) or if they do they are not very good at it. The journals also don’t do the formerly technical work of typesetting anymore, mostly just bunging papers into some kind of template and requiring authors to do half the work of following journal style. I think the journals aren’t acting as some kind of spam filter before papers get to the (unpaid) editors, except maybe for the biggest journals. I don’t really buy the argument that big journals fund the little ones because the little journals are given large price tags and libraries do not get the option to exclude them from subscriptions. FWIW my theory about the large university press building for my university is that it contains a lot of printed material waiting for shipping, possibly contains (or was designed to contain) printing presses, and is enlarged by a business printing some (high school level) examination papers that are used by many schools internationally, though I’m not sure the press prints them and not some other business.
- samstave 6y agoSo what reparations are they making to Aaron if their story is true (which it is not) The people in charge of this 'Trove' should be drawn and quartered. We know the truth about you minsky dershowitz pedos.
- Gene5ive 6y agoShoulda done this on January 10th, 2013
- UncleOxidant 6y agoVery cool. I followed a link to their Evolutionary Computation Journal last week and wondered why they were letting me read the articles for free - now I know why.
- nameless_me 6y agoAaron Schwartz, you did not die in vain. RIP.
- jonas_kgomo 6y agoHow easy is it to publish your own open source journal, genuinely curious!
- Fomite 6y agoTechnically? Very easy. Time wise? Less easy. In a way where it will be respected in the field, read, and attract quality submissions? Hard, unless it's an offshoot of something pre-existing.
- jonas_kgomo 6y agoI guess the open-access overlay journal approach is the cheapest, now looking for a free peer review platform, alternative to Scholastica
- tester756 6y ago>Reviews of "Emergence of a novel SARS-CoV-2 strain in Southern California, USA" >https://rapidreviewscovid19.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/jrlok92l/release/3 https://rapidreviewscovid19.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/jrlok92l/re... >Reviewer 1 (Takahiko Koyama) | ◻ Reliable >Reviewer 2 (François Balloux) | ◻◻◻◻ Misleading >Reviewer 3 (Lee W Riley) | ◻◻◻◻ Misleading Interesting
- dang 6y agoSubmitted title was "MIT Press has granted full access to all its journals". What's the source for that? It's extremely important to be accurate with this kind of thing. The discussion below is all based on assuming that that title is literally true. The HN guidelines specifically ask you not to rewrite titles unless they are misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I've changed the URL from https://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showPublications https://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showPublications, which doesn't explain anything, to the press release which, although it's a press release, sort of does. Nevertheless it's hard to figure out what exactly is being announced here.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tokai 6y agoWell the title was true. There is full access to the journals. People seem to think that means open access though. The new link is about all new monographs being open access, which isn't the same as read access to mit journals.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zvr 6y agoI haven't seen any announcement for _all_ the journals but I got a number of emails that _MIT Sloan Management Review_ site is unlocked March 2-4: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/big-picture-little-picture-weve-got-you-covered/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/big-picture-little-pictu... Maybe all the MIT publications do the same?
- pvg 6y agoIs MIT Sloan Management Review an MIT Press thing? It sort of looks like it isn't, at first glance so it might not be related to this at all.
- tokai 6y agoThe 'full access' in the title here made me frown. Some publishers like to use that term when they let you read the article, without making the licensing open. It seems like the journals are released with a mix of true open access and read access. There is yet some way to go sadly.
- dougmccune 6y agoLots of comments here about academic journals. This announcement is about monographs, not journals. Monographs are books. Usually small print runs, as they are niche and targeted for specific academic disciplines. The target audience is other academics and distribution is heavily through academic libraries. Think of dissertations when you’re completing a PhD.
- ilaksh 6y agoMonographs means books and papers right? But I can already get almost all papers on sites like arxiv or if not then on sci-hub.
- drummer 6y agoAny interesting books worth checking out? Does anyone have recommendations?