Shannon Mattern: MIT Press's "open-access 📚 in the humanities + social sciences were used nearly 4X more often when compared to paywalled counterparts, and they received 21% more citations. For STEM fields, the open-access 📚 were used nearly 3X more often and received 15% more citations."

MIT Press's "open-access 📚 in the humanities + social sciences were used nearly 4X more often when compared to paywalled counterparts, and they received 21% more citations. For STEM fields, the open-access 📚 were used nearly 3X more often and received 15% more citations."

MIT Press could shift higher education’s publishing modelwww.insidehighered.com MIT Press’s digital approach has broadened readership of monographs, but questions remain on whether its “idealistic” open-access model can change the publishing industry.

"MIT Press is not simply converting scholarly 📚 into a digital format; it is changing the entire business model... Instead of libraries buying a collection of paywalled books, they fund the open-access model before publication. Universities pay a flat rate, depending on their size"

"A lot of uni presses might like to be able to do this, but they don’t have their own digital platform to provide access to the books, or they don’t have a sales team... We can celebrate what MIT has done here and also recognize the model they used is not going to be applicable for everyone.”

"Uni librarians care very much about open access. That doesn’t mean that they’re in a position to provide direct financial support to every possible open-access project... Most library patrons... are much more concerned with access to journal content than with access to scholarly monographs"

A couple years ago I saw an abstract related to sci-hub with similar conclusions. Lemme see if I can find it.

Not quite as striking as a 3-4X it turns out: arxiv.org/abs/2006.14979

The Sci-hub Effect: Sci-hub downloads lead to more article citationsarxiv.org Citations are often used as a metric of the impact of scientific publications. Here, we examine how the number of downloads from Sci-hub as well as various characteristics of publications and...

Thanks - there's some interesting research on various forms of repositories (sanctioned institutional repositories, disciplinary "commons," "shadow" collections like SciHub, etc), which obvs share work after it's already been edited + published by institutions like MIT Press

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