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

["Bev Acreman" <Bev.Acreman@biomedcentral.com>]

Apologies for Cross-Posting

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@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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