Open Access at the MIT Press

Open access locks of various sizes and bright MIT Press colors float on a white background.

Open Access at the MIT Press

The MIT Press has been an open access leader for nearly three decades, publishing hundreds of books and articles openly, and working with authors, editors, scholars, societies, and research institutions to disseminate scholarly work as broadly as possible. The MIT Press supports a variety of open access funding models for select books and journals and sits on the leading edge of the open access movement in scholarly communication.

We focus our work in three areas: books, journals, and open access initiatives. If you are interested in learning more about open access at the MIT Press, please contact Nick Lindsay, director of journals and open access, at nlindsay (at) mit.edu.

View our open access brochure [PDF]

Open access news

New white paper “Access to Science and Scholarship: Key Questions about the Future of Research Publishing”

November 30, 2023

The project—including MIT Press’s Director and Publisher Amy Brand and Director of Journals and Open Access Nick Lindsay—examines the current state of the research enterprise and what might come next.

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This Giving Tuesday: 2x the impact for MIT Press open access initiatives

November 27, 2023

With your help on Giving Tuesday, we will expand our efforts to develop equitable models for open publishing.

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Valuing community for Open Access Week

October 23, 2023

Nick Lindsay, director of journals and open access, outlines the latest open access initiatives at the Press.

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Open access books

With the open publication of City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn by William J. Mitchell in 1995, the MIT Press vaulted into the open access publishing space where it has pushed the limits for close to 30 years. Now, the Press is widely recognized as one of the most innovative open access publishers in the world and has made more than 350 open access books available.

Direct to Open, our open access publishing model, has accelerated our program, publishing over 160 books — scholarly monographs and scholarly collections — in the first two years. And in 2024, we will release the much-anticipated Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, edited by Michael C. Frank (Stanford) and Asifa Majid (Oxford).

Open access journals

The MIT Press open access publishing program in journals began with the conversion of Information Technology and International Development from subscription-based to open access in 2006. Our longest-running open access journal is Computational Linguistics, which moved to open access in 2009. Now we are proud that all of our active journals offer some form of open access support, with 13 diamond or gold open access journals. This means our journals make it easy for authors to comply with open access publishing and science requirements from funders or institutions and ensure their scholarship reaches the widest global audience possible.

The logo for Imaging Neuroscience features a white brain shape formed by vertical bars against a neon green background and the title of the journal beneath in black text.
Quantitative Science Studies Logo
Harvard Data Science Review
The brain in the logo of Network Neuroscience is split in two. Theleft side shows a scientific feeling graph of dozens of connected dots that look like neurons in orange. The right side is made up of a creative, colorful mosaic of many colors.
This logo is formed from four red lines of varying widths and lengths, overlaid to form an irregular shaped box with lines extended from the shape.
daedalus
The CRCJ logo looks like an infinity symbol, composed of parallel blue curved lines against a green backdrop. The colors are earthy and the lines resemble a ploughed field.
The Neurobiology of Language logo is an open circle crisscrossed by curved lines, woven together. The left side of the circle features a purple-red-pink gradient, while the right side has a blue-green gradient.
American Journal of Law and Equality
DINT logo_white
opmi1367169105
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.

Open access initiatives

Much like our parent institution, the MIT Press thrives on creative excellence and effective entrepreneurship. As we work “daily to reimagine what a university press can be,” we strive to disrupt restrictive modes of scholarship and redefine scholarly publishing for the 21st century.

Our dedication to innovation is why we were among the first publishers to embrace digital catalogs and ebooks. It is what led to our launching, with the MIT Media Lab in 2018, Knowledge Futures,  now a transformative platform developer for open access tools, which includes the PubPub content platform. It is what inspired Direct to Open, a sustainable and scalable open access publishing model that harnesses the collective power of libraries around the globe and has published over 160 open access books in its first two years.

This commitment to reducing barriers to scholarship continues to inspire our work along new lines of inquiry in scholarly communications and open access publishing.

Launched in 2021, Direct to Open (D2O) harnesses the collective power of libraries to support open and equitable access to vital, leading scholarship. With generous support from Arcadia, and in close collaboration with the library community, we have reached:

  • 322 libraries
  • 10 consortia
  • 160+ books
  • 328k reads

MIT Open Publishing Services (MITops) is a scholar-focused, MIT-branded hosting and publishing services operation. Working with our technology partner Knowledge Futures, we provide a portfolio of professional publishing services to mission-aligned partners.

PubPub is an open access publishing platform that socializes the process of knowledge creation by integrating conversation, annotation, and versioning into short- and long-form digital publication. The MIT Press publishes a variety of traditional and experimental projects on PubPub.

View the MIT Press Open Access on PubPub collection

Support open access

We are grateful to the many partners who have supported the open access mission at the MIT Press over the years.

In May 2023, we announced the establishment of the Arcadia Open Access Fund to support open access books and journals in science and technology, social sciences, arts, and humanities. This fund is made possible by an outright endowment gift of $5 million from Arcadia, who has also provided a $5 million “challenge” gift to incentivize other funders by matching their support of MIT’s open publishing activities.

Learn more about how you can support open access at the MIT Press.