Nick Lindsay, director of journals and open access, outlines the latest open access initiatives at the Press
Encouraging experimentation and offering new alternatives for scholarly communication are values that are deep in the bones of the MIT Press, made clear by our continued support of open access publishing.
Join MIT Libraries and the MIT Press on Thursday, October 26 for an online panel including the Press’s Nick Lindsay and Dr. Stephen M. Smith, the editor of Imaging Neuroscience.
The theme of this year’s International Open Access Week is “Community over Commercialization,” which is tailor-made for many of the efforts we have undertaken in our journals program in recent years. Two of our youngest publications—Quantitative Science Studies (QSS) and Imaging Neuroscience—began anew at the MIT Press (in 2019 and 2023, respectively) after the editorial boards of competing journals expressed dissatisfaction with commercial publisher practices like high publication fees for authors. And we can see just how much the scholarly community supports these moves.
QSS, the official journal of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, has been an unqualified success and now serves as a primary node for the distribution of rigorous open access scholarship in science studies. This year, QSS was crowned the #1 new journal in its field of library and information science based on citation rates and only continues to grow in stature.
Imaging Neuroscience is our newest journal and we hope it will quickly emulate QSS to become a cornerstone for the neuroimaging community. In spring 2023, the editorial teams at Neuroimage and Neuroimage: Reports resigned en masse from their previous publisher over high publication fees for authors and came to MIT Press to become the editorial group for Imaging Neuroscience. The Press worked quickly to stand up the journal—which has, in the space of a few months, already been embraced by the neuroimaging community. After launching with its first articles in July, Imaging Neuroscience already has a steady pipeline of new scholarship rolling in and is gaining the support of the neuroimaging community.
By bringing these titles to the Press with lower publishing fees for authors—while at the same time retaining their editorial excellence—we’ve greatly expanded their reach and have given the academic community new ways to think about what it truly needs out of the scholarly communications ecosystem. This is the just the beginning of our work with other like-minded organizations and individuals who value community over commercialization.