Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Why the hell is MIT stashing information in closed systems in first place? I thought the idea (OCW etc.) was to enable more people to learn, participate and benefit from work of academics and researchers. Hell I even donate a few hundred bucks every now and then to OCW.

It is mind boggling how the supposedly smart people are not getting their heads out of their asses so late in a world frighteningly short on distribution of knowledge that can be effectively used to solve the wicked problems that are crippling it for so long.

We really need a global, openly accessible knowledge network and a platform where all eligible can contribute and collaborate to research at least when it comes to areas that impact human society at large - medicines, natural resources etc. It is hard otherwise to see how things like Cancer and Energy shortage can be tackled.

The papers are from JSTOR, not MIT. MIT pays for a subscription to JSTOR like many other universities do.

But is it clear that MIT does not also store its research papers in JSTOR instead of making them publicly available? Reading the article I did not get that impression.

While many researchers at MIT publish in journals that sometimes have restrictions on the distribution of their papers (exclusivity, etc.), most MIT publications are issued via:

1) DSpace http://dspace.mit.edu (an open publishing platform for academic material. Most all theses produced by MIT researchers can be accessed by the public here)

2) as an MIT technical report (mostly published via dspace)

3) as an MIT "Working Paper"

You can find more information here: http://libraries.mit.edu/docs/research-publications.html

Certainly, a huge number of MIT publications do end up being mirrored in JSTOR, but they are usually published via whatever journal or conference proceeding they are accepted to first. If an author cannot find a journal that is willing to publish their paper, then they will probably issue it as an MIT technical report.

Ok, that's actually useful information. I find MIT's approach fairly reasonable - may be all others should follow suit and JSTOR-like walls would not be necessary some day.

I donate to OCW as well (LOVE OCW) but I don't think any of this information is on a closed system. I believe JSTOR allowed all mit ip addresses access (for free) to every article in their system.

Aaron's downloads came from an MIT address to the JSTOR database.

I agree with you that knowledge needs to be more accessible, but this is not the method to achieve it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com