Open Access to Scholarly Research

The Society of Automotive Engineers publications board is considering removing "Digital Rights Management" controls on its database of scholarly papers. This comes in reaction to MIT's decision to cancel access to the database because of the DRM controls. Ellen F. Duranceau, scholarship publishing and licensing consultant for MIT Libraries, said that “The core issue is the reaction of the authors here in discovering that when they had written papers and given SAE the right to the materials, [the group] betrayed their trust,” she said. “No one was under a naive assumption that everything should be free, but there was an understanding that things should be made as barrier-free as possible.”