It's great that they're doing this, but I wonder: what is causing this sudden swing toward openness? Have they always wanted to open their research, but just never been able to do so economically until the Internet came along?
On top of that, many people do not have institutional access, and are thus cut off from research results funded primarily or solely by their tax dollars. Or another way to look at it is that many "prestigious" journals will claim exclusive copyright, giving researchers the unfortunate choice between prestige and open access.
I'm still learning about this, as some people I know are pushing in the open research / open access direction.
Can anyone here who works for Google tell us if all of these results are actually loadable from the Google campus? This seems likely, given how they are indexable by the search engine but are blocked to anyone else save paid subscribers.
Google could easily put a stop to this abuse by declaring that it will publicly cache anything it finds to be loadable only from its own IP range.
Also - this MIT is interesting (and good) but I doubt it would be applied everywhere. Will everyone at MIT stop publishing in IEEE journals (very restrictive about copyright)?
That said, I suspect "open access" is to the traditional world what P2P is to the music industry: it's scary and presents a real threat to their livelihood.