MIT Press makes 82 additional books open access

https://mitpress.mit.edu/mit-presss-direct-to-open-d2o-achieves-second-year-goal-opens-access-to-eighty-two-new-books-in-2023/

by gregsadetsky • 3 years ago

70 12 3 years ago

mitpress.mit.edu

akasakahakada• 3 years ago

I think the list is a legit showcase of how broken the academia is in case of making titles.

Every book is literally

XXX: YYYYYYYYYYYYY

With nonsense main-title and long as hell sub-title.

Why not put some effort into making a medium length descriptive title all in a single sentence?

bmitc• 3 years ago

Title styling aside, MIT Press is an excellent publisher.

j7ake• 3 years ago

Most academic textbooks are not for general audience.

If the main title and subtitle don’t make any sense to some people, then the author did not write the textbook for that audience.

patmorgan23• 3 years ago

This feels like the same complaint that you can't gain all the nuance in an article from reading it's headline. A title is there to be eye catching and get you interested in the subject. If you want to know what the book is about read a short synopsis or the table of contents.

stonedge• 3 years ago

I wrote a paper for a class a few months ago. In a previous life, I was a tech-audience editor that required writing article titles with a hook to lure people into reading. On my first draft of the paper, I used one of these styled titles and the comments that came back said that it was too "flowery"; since it was an academic paper, it should be more like the pattern you indicated. And sure enough, I changed it and all my subsequent papers to that pattern and never got dinged again.

aredox• 3 years ago

This is a legit showcase of how broken American publishing is in case of making titles. This pattern is so typically American than I can immediately identify it, the same way American TV shows or documentaries are esthetically strongly peculiar.

peanutcrisis2• 3 years ago

It might just be me, but the books that were made open access seems to have a distinct slant at first glance. I wonder if the list is intentionally curated with some ideological goal in mind, the way the American Library Association does with their "queering of the catalog" [0].

[0] https://newdiscourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/drabins...

aaomidi• 3 years ago

Right wing politics generally has a lot less affinity for reading. Also they’re not the ones getting their books banned in half the country, so accessibility isn’t a problem.

inhumantsar3• 3 years ago

I counted maybe five or six books which might have a "distinct slant" based on nothing but the title, and nearly all of those were of the "viewing this topic from this perspective" variety. The vast majority of those titles seem distinctly technical and/or non-political.

Claiming that this was "intentionally curated with some ideological goal in mind" is a stretch. Baader-Meinhoff maybe?

inhumantsar3• 3 years ago

Also it seems like these titles came from the libraries they made partnerships with and the authors who agreed to OA. Not sure any individual or committee curated the list.

peanutcrisis2• 3 years ago

The Baader-Meinhof effect is possible.

I did also recently learn about the ALA's president's philosophy towards library management, so I could be drawing parallels between that and what the MIT is doing when there's none.

I will probably give the listing a more rigorous look again.

MIT Press makes 82 additional books open access

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