As someone who teaches evidence-based practice, I am well aware that a major barrier to those outside of academia or a large medical center is access to high quality research evidence. This news as reported by Wired is a small but significant step toward open access:

Scientific publishing might have just reached a tipping point, thanks to a new open access policy at MIT.

Following a more limited open-access mandate at Harvard, the legendary school’s faculty voted last week to make all of their papers available for free on the web, the first university-wide policy of its sort.

Hal Abelson, who spearheaded the effort, said that these agreements went beyond providing a repository for papers, they changed the power dynamics between scientific publishers and researchers…

Many scientists and researchers have pushed for open access policies, but publishers have been reluctant to give up control of the informational resources they have….

But open access advocates say the current scientific publishing paradigm is broken because publishers control the scientific record, not academics.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Ann writes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.