Chester Fritz Library Supports Open Access with MIT’s Direct to Open Initiative

In 2018 Chester Fritz Library adopted an Open Access Statement of Support, pledging to support open access in line with OneUND’s values of community, discovery, liberal arts, and lifelong learning. In service of this goal, we maintain UND’s open access institutional repository, the UND Scholarly Commons, as well as participate in administering UND’s OER grants as part of the campus’ Open Educational Resources working group. This year, we are broadening open access to scholarly resources by supporting MIT Press’ Direct to Open program. 

At the end of 2021, the MIT Press gained enough support for their new program, Direct to Open, to make all newly published books through June 30, 2022 openly available. Previously, books made openly available at the MIT Press were partially funded – either by single title or as a small collection. The goal of this program is to allow MIT Press to make all scholarly books published in 2022 open access.

Participating in this program allows us access to the backfile of the MIT Press eBooks that would have normally been behind a paywall. This provides us with over 2,300 scholarly titles on the MIT Press Direct platform. It is an exciting opportunity to not only support Open Access initiatives but also have a broader range of scholarly collections made available! So far, MIT Press has made 12 of the 37 titles openly available. In addition to the 2022 published books, here are some selected, notable titles from the MIT Press:

• Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio & Lauren F. Klein
• Your Computer is on Fire edited by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip
• Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory edited by Sofia Y. Leung & Jorge R. López-McKnight
• Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities by Lucy Montgomery, John Hartley, Cameron Neylon, Malcolm Gillies, Eve Gray, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang, Joan Leach, Jason Potts, Xiang Ren, Katherine Skinner, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Katie Wilson