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@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@MIT, the institutional repository managed by the Libraries.
DSpace@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@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."
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