MIT faculty recently voted unanimously to make all publications free and available on the web as part of a trend in Boston-area universities toward open access publication. This move follows Harvard University faculty passing a similar vote last February as well as the NIH policy which states that all NIH-funded studies must be deposited into PubMed Central. These new developments are strong statements about the way scientists see science publishing and the distribution of new findings.

Open access to scientific literature, while contentious in many circles, can be a lifeline to university libraries struggling with the costs of journal subscriptions. Additionally, the new policies at MIT and Harvard will make publications not only free, but available online, a key move toward speeding the dissemination of scientific advances and making them available to a wider range of interested readers.

The policies clearly have support from the researchers themselves, but the execution of the policies remains a sticking point. The many details of copyright-transfer agreements, proper submission forms, and making sense of which journals will provide what service can seem like a daunting set of tasks for researchers when piled on top of the already involved publication process. The librarians at Harvard Medical School’s Countway library understand this, and have developed a program which will automate the deposition of HMS publications into PubMed Central as well as HMS’s own voluntary online open access publication server.

The importance of these developments is two-fold. The first is that scientists at top institutions support open access publishing models, a fact that could potentially ripple through multiple other academic institutions. The second is that the universities themselves are making the transitions easier, by setting up programs to automate and simplify the process of making publications free and available online. The question that Corie posed last year following Harvard’s announcement of the move toward open access stands – what will the publishers do in the coming years? How will they adapt their current business models and practices to accommodate the researchers, institutions, and the NIH who insist on the deposition of articles in PubMed Central and other servers?