If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access.

So far, the battle lines on open access have been drawn with publishers on one side, funding groups on the other. Funding groups, such as the NIH, Wellcome Trust, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, feel that the research they pay for will have a larger impact if more people have access to it. In the case of government agencies, there's the added issue of allowing access by the tax payers that ultimately fund the work. This has led a number of them to adopt policies in which the researchers they fund retain the right to freely distribute their works some time after publication. This grace period, usually six months to a year, allows the publishers to extract some value out of their role in arranging for the review and formatting of the works.

The NIH had been promoting open access for several years, but the policy was made mandatory in 2008, and that change was made permanent this year. With its multibillion dollar budget, the NIH policy change was a seismic shift; although some publishers embraced the change, there has been a notable backlash. Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee felt it had not been properly consulted when the mandatory policy was enacted. For the past two years, bills have been introduced that would overturn it.

Although there are some passionate advocates of open access publishing within the community of research faculty, this fight was, to an extent, going on over their heads. After all, faculty are completely reliant on both parties involved: the funding agencies pay for their work, and publishers ensure that it finds an audience. Obviously, this puts the faculty in no position to negotiate.

All of that helps explain the significance of the policy adopted by the MIT faculty, which commits everyone at MIT to a policy that is even more aggressive than the one that governs NIH grant recipients. (Hal Abelson, who chaired the committee that drafted the policy has posted a copy of it). In short, as of last week, everyone at MIT is expected to retain rights to distribute their works at no cost for their parent institution. Anybody who wants to publish with a journal that refuses to grant these rights will have to submit a written request for an exception to the MIT provost.

The faculty will have to prepare an appropriately formatted copy of their works to the provost for hosting. MIT plans to place them on its DSpace system, a content hosting system it developed with HP and distributes under a BSD license.

Far more striking than the policy itself, however, is the perspective of those who were instrumental in formulating it. Professor Hal Abelson, in a statement provided by MIT, said, "scholarly publishing has so far been based purely on contracts between publishers and individual faculty authors. In that system, faculty members and their institutions are powerless. This resolution changes that by creating a role in the publishing process for the faculty as a whole, not just as isolated individuals." Ann Wolpert, who directs MIT's libraries, said, "in the quest for higher profits, publishers have lost sight of the values of the academy."

Those are pretty clearly fighting words. The policy itself doesn't seem to involve any attempt to find middle ground with the publishers, as there is no grace period where journals would have exclusive access, in contrast to the NIH policy. Clearly, the MIT faculty produce a lot of research that academic publishers will be anxious not to lose access to, but MIT seems to be hoping that other universities follow along, citing similar policies enacted by individual schools at Harvard and Stanford.

Another approach to open access publishing is being tested by Sweden's Lund University, which is allocating money to support those of its faculty that wish to publish in open access journals. In this case, the money goes to support open access publishers; Lund refused a campus-wide discount for publishing with the Public Library of Science, and will instead pay the higher individual rates. It's also decided not to use this money to pay for open access articles in an otherwise closed publication.

These developments indicate that faculty want to have more options than contributing to the open access debate as individual advocates. If more institutions that have the size and intellectual heft of MIT stake out similar positions, then the researchers may have a very powerful voice.