The MIT Press Open Access Fund

Multicolored open access locks levitate against a white background.

The MIT Press Open Access Fund

The MIT Press Open Access Fund is an endowment to support the Press’s groundbreaking 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 endowment was established in 2023 with an initial 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.

Funding the future of open access

Your gift to the MIT Press Open Access Fund helps the Press sustain a variety of open access funding models; publish hundreds of scholarly books and journal articles openly each year; and develop the tools, models, and resources that make scholarship more accessible to researchers and other readers around the world.

“The new endowment makes it possible for the MIT Press to build on and sustain its influential publishing programs,” says Amy Brand, Director and Publisher of the MIT Press. “With this enduring support for open books and journals, we can use our power as an academic publisher to expand public understanding of scholarship and science and to democratize participation in research.”

MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart, praises the Press's open access commitment, saying, “the Press’s initiatives help transform scholarly publishing for the better and align with MIT’s broader institutional support for open access to knowledge.”

Our open access successes

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 and 10 consortia and published 250 books.

Open access journals publishing

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. 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 subscription-based journals to flip to a diamond open access publishing model.

The Rapid Reviews logo features a modern and unconventional layout and colors. RR is set to the left in light purple with a backslash that resembles a file section. Infectious Diseases is elevated to the right and in an aqua color.

The fight against misinformation

Rapid ReviewsInfectious Diseases (RRID) is an award-winning, open-access overlay journal that accelerates peer review of preprint research to highlight promising studies and prevent misinformation. The editorial team has recently expanded efforts to recruit and train a global network of scholars to speedily identify relevant preprints and peer reviewers.

The Rapid Reviews logo features a modern and unconventional layout and colors. RR is set to the left in light purple with a backslash that resembles a file section. Infectious Diseases is elevated to the right and in an aqua color.
MIT Open Publishing Services

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.

MIT Open Publishing Services

A new generation of MIT Press reference works

The forthcoming Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (OECS) will use the PubPub platform to create an up-to-date resource of foundational concepts and to provide structure and connections across an otherwise overwhelming array of disciplines, books, journals, and other resources.

Open access classroom resources

For over 30 years, students around the world have benefited from open access versions of our renowned computer science textbooks, including Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1984), Reinforcement Learning (1998), How to Design Programs (2001), and Deep Learning (2016). With traditional textbook costs on the rise, we hope to explore new open access alternatives with authors, faculty, and higher ed institutions.

Are you interested in directing a major gift to an area of interest, or making a planned gift?
Contact MIT Press Director and Publisher Amy Brand, at amybrand@mit.edu.