Open access publishing

The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell's City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition. We support a variety of open access funding models for select books, including monographs, trade books, and textbooks.

MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies is a robust digital collection of classic and previously out-of-print architecture and urban studies books hosted on our digital book platform, MIT Press Direct.

Direct to Open

In 2021, the MIT Press announced the launch of Direct to Open (D2O). A innovative, sustainable framework for open access monographs, D2O moves professional and scholarly books from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model. 

D2O gives institutions the opportunity to harness collective action to support access to knowledge. Beginning in 2022, all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections will be openly available on the MIT Press Direct eBook platform. Instead of purchasing a title once for a single collection, libraries now have the opportunity to fund them one time for the world through participant fees.  

Journals

The MIT Press journals division also has a long-standing commitment to open access and makes hundreds of articles free on its website mitpressjournals.org.

All MIT Press subscription journals support author-paid open access (the “hybrid” model). Including three Gold OA journals launching this year, the Press publishes several completely open access journals: Computational Linguistics, Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science, and Network Neuroscience.

Support OA at The MIT Press

"“Free” is still a rare practice in academic book publishing, and the MIT Press, with its strong public service orientation, is a leader in thinking about and experimenting with the commercial feasibility of various approaches to open access."

- Eric von Hippel (T. Wilson (1953) Professor of Technological Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management) in his 2016 book Free Innovation.

Founded in 2018 as a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, the Knowledge Futures Group is committed to building a full-stack of technology protocols and products that support and promote an effective, equitable, and sustainable knowledge economy. The KFG works with partners, like the MIT Press, to design and deploy sustainable tools and technologies for publishers, researchers, libraries, museums, activist organizations, and others whose knowledge work contributes to our collective understanding and the public good.  The KFG’s technology stack is a vital service component of the MIT’s Open Publishing Services program (MITops).  MITops leverages the KFG’s distinctive, open-source, mission-aligned infrastructure to ensure that scholars have access to enduring cost-effective solutions to the production, curation, and preservation of knowledge.