[BOAI] BioMed Central partners with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries to deposit open access articles automatically using SWORD protocol

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from BioMed Cenral.  --Peter Suber.]


BioMed Central announcement
29 April 2010
=======================================

BioMed Central partners with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries
to deposit open access articles automatically using SWORD protocol

BioMed Central, the leading open access publisher, has worked with the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries to develop an
automated system that uses the latest technology to automatically populate
MIT's digital repository, DSpace at MIT, with the official version of articles
by MIT researchers that have been published in BioMed Central's journals.

MIT's faculty played a leading role in the movement toward increased access
to research results. In March 2009 the Institute's faculty unanimously
adopted a campus-wide open access policy, signaling their commitment to
making the published results of their work freely available.  The MIT
Libraries, charged with implementing the policy, have begun to make articles
available through the 'MIT Open Access Articles' collection in DSpace at MIT,
the institutional repository managed by the Libraries.

DSpace at MIT contains the digital research materials of MIT faculty and
researchers, including peer-reviewed scholarly articles, preprints,
technical reports, theses and conference papers. Once saved in the online
repository, materials can be searched and shared worldwide. Already, over
1,000 articles have been added to the 'MIT Open Access Articles' collection.

In order to make it easier for MIT authors to submit articles to DSpace at MIT,
the MIT Libraries worked with BioMed Central to set up an automatic feed of
MIT articles, using a version of the Simple Web-service Offering Repository
Deposit (SWORD) protocol. The SWORD protocol allows the institutional
repository to receive newly published articles from any of BioMed Central's
200+ journals as soon as they are published, without the need for any effort
on the part of the author and streamlining the deposit process for the
repository administrator.

In describing the importance of the SWORD integration, Matthew Cockerill,
BioMed Central's Managing Director said, "Campus open access policies are
hugely important, but the effort involved in compliance can be a major
obstacle to their success. That is why we think that automated deposit has
an important role to play. We hope that this pioneering work by BioMed
Central in collaboration with MIT Libraries will encourage other
institutions to work with us to establish similar automated feeds, and we
encourage other publishers to adopt a similar approach."



Media Contact
Matt McKay
Head of PR
BioMed Central

Tel:  +44 (0)20 3192 2126
Mob: +44 (0)7825 257 423
Email: matthew.mckay at biomedcentral.com



Notes to Editors:

1. BioMed Central's SWORD deposit service
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/libraries/sword

2. DSpace at MIT  http://dspace.mit.edu/

3. MIT's open access policy
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/open-access-policy.html

4. BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com) is an STM (Science, Technology and
Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model.
All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made
immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow
redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is part of Springer
Science+Business Media, a leading global publisher in the STM sector.
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