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.

"What's important here is that it's giving the university a formal role in how publications happen," Abelson said. "Some of the faculty said, 'You're calling this an open-access resolution but actually the way to think of it is as a collective bargaining agreement.'"

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. Big companies like Wiley John & Sons, The Macmillan Publishers' Nature Publishing Group, and Reed Elsevier argue that they provide valuable and expensive peer-review, and that there's no way to ensure quality without the subscription fees that they charge libraries and universities.

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

"Who actually should be controlling the scholarly record?" Abelson asked. "Universities have a mission that has something to do with producing and disseminating knowledge. These publishers, whatever their good intentions may be, have a mission to make money for their stockholders. The system is a little out of whack."

That's a major reason that Congress approved an open access policy for National Institutes of Health-funded research. Under the NIH public access policy, papers are made public twelve months after publication.

The scientific publishing system, which developed long before the internet, doesn't allow for scientific information to be accessed freely like most web content is.

This creates data silos within individual publisher's journals and prevents the sharing and data mining of scientific information, open access advocates argue.

Paul Ginsparg, who created the physics pre-print server known as arXiv, summarized the problem back in 2000.

"If we were to start from scratch today to design a quality controlled distribution system for research findings," he wrote, "it would likely take a very different form both from the current system and from the electronic clone it would spawn without more constructive input from the research community.

The latest step from MIT is a sign that an increasing number of faculty members are beginning to think the publishing paradigm has to change, but it's not going to be easy.

"This is big," wrote Peter Suber, an open access advocate with Public Knowledge, a Washington D.C. non-profit.

But he also noted that the faculty resolution included a clause that allowed researchers to opt-out of the open access system for specific publications. This could mean that the most important papers — the big Science and Nature publications — don't end up freely available to the public.

"I certainly expect it to be used. Harvard's has been used," Abelson said. "The fact is that in the current climate, you have to give people the ability to opt out."

Stuart Shieber, the computer scientist who designed Harvard's open access policy, said that it was too early to tell if there were systematic uses of the waivers, but that so far, the percentage of faculty opting out was small.

"I think it's early to have any kind of definitive notion of how that's all going to shake out," Shieber said.

Still, Abelson said that he expected that the limitations of the new policy would be overcome in time.

"This is a nice step but it is the beginning of what's got to be a five-year process," said Abelson. "There will be some other kind of equilibrium."

AAAS CEO and Science's executive publisher, Alan Leshner, struck a similar, tentative note.

"We're not yet certain what the MIT faculty decision might mean for our journal," he wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. "We already permit authors to post their articles to their institutional repositories, and we also allow limited educational use of articles published by Science. We will have questions related to the MIT decision regarding the secondary redistribution of any content that has been peer-reviewed and published by our journal."

To track those developments, keep an eye on Dspace, where the MIT papers will soon be published.

*Update 8:45 AM, 3/26: Corrected owner of Nature Publishing Group to Macmillan Publishers.

Update 9:47 AM, 3/26: Updated to add comment from Stuart Shieber.

Update 10:14 AM, 3/26: Updated to add statement from Science's Alan Leshner. *

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