[katz]

The printing of physical journals was extremely expensive. So this was the main concern.

Also - this MIT is interesting (and good) but I doubt it would be applied everywhere. Will everyone at MIT stop publishing in IEEE journals (very restrictive about copyright)?

[lutorm]

If those IEEE journals require that copyright be signed over to them without granting permission to the authors to make available their work, I don't see how they can publish in them.

[silentOpen]

The policy on which the MIT faculty voted allows opt-out provided the author(s) provide a reason. The new policy is a great step for MIT and the research community as a whole but still requires MIT to stand up to journals who demand exclusive rights. It will be interesting to see how much backbone MIT asserts.

[wheels]

It's nice that it's MIT though since they're one of the institutions with the academic weight that a journal wouldn't want to cut themselves off from the authors there.

That said, I suspect "open access" is to the traditional world what P2P is to the music industry: it's scary and presents a real threat to their livelihood.