
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.
Open access news
New white paper “Access to Science and Scholarship: Key Questions about the Future of Research Publishing”
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.
Read MoreThis Giving Tuesday: 2x the impact for MIT Press open access initiatives
With your help on Giving Tuesday, we will expand our efforts to develop equitable models for open publishing.
Read MoreValuing community for Open Access Week
Nick Lindsay, director of journals and open access, outlines the latest open access initiatives at the Press.
Read MoreWith 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).
Computational Thinking Curricula in K–12
May 21, 2024
Hedgehogs, Killing, and Kindness
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Exploring and Exploiting Genetic Risk for Psychiatric Disorders
October 10, 2023
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The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities
October 3, 2023
Mainstreaming and Game Journalism
September 26, 2023
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Design, Empathy, Interpretation
September 12, 2023
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Probabilistic Machine Learning
August 15, 2023
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The Unequal Effects of Globalization
August 15, 2023
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Forecasting Travel in Urban America
July 11, 2023
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Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children
June 27, 2023
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Catastrophes, Confrontations, and Constraints
June 6, 2023
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Distributional Reinforcement Learning
May 30, 2023
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Machine Learning for Data Streams
May 9, 2023
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Principles of Knowledge Auditing
May 2, 2023
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April 25, 2023
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The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist
April 18, 2023
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The Space between Look and Read
April 18, 2023
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Fiscal Policy under Low Interest Rates
January 10, 2023
Introduction to Autonomous Robots
December 20, 2022
A World Trading System for the Twenty-First Century
December 20, 2022
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December 13, 2022
Universal Access and Its Asymmetries
December 13, 2022
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The Power of Partnership in Open Government
December 6, 2022
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Interdisciplinarity in the Making
November 22, 2022
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Optimal Motherhood and Other Lies Facebook Told Us
November 8, 2022
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Educating for the Anthropocene
November 1, 2022
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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.












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.
- Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, from MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing
- Computing the Future: 10 Years of Innovation at MIT CSAIL
- Generative AI papers from the MIT community
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.
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.