MIT, Arcadia Support Open Access to Knowledge

Arcadia, a UK charitable foundation that works to preserve nature and cultural heritage and promotes open access to knowledge, donated $10 million to MIT Press to establish the Arcadia Open Acess Fund.

The fund will support the MIT Press’ ground-breaking efforts to publish open-access books and journals across scientific, social science, arts, and humanities fields. It will further their development of tools, models, and resources to make research and scholarship more accessible to researchers and readers worldwide.

The MIT Press supports a variety of open access funding models, publishing hundreds of scholarly books and journal articles, working with authors, editors, societies, and universities to disseminate their works as broadly as possible. In 2021, with Arcadia’s help, they established Direct to Open, a collective-action model making publishing open access monographs more sustainable through institutional partnerships.

Half of the donation is a “challenge” gift to help encourage other funders to match Arcadia’s support of MIT’s open publishing.

“We believe open access to knowledge is a public good. Arcadia hopes that this gift encourages others to help build a permanent endowment which ensures free access to MIT Press’s scholarly books and journals in perpetuity, and inspires other universities to follow MIT’s lead,” said Professor Peter Baldwin, chair of Arcadia’s Donor Board.