open letter on open access

This letter is addressed to Pam Quick, Permissions Coordinator of The
MIT Press. A copy of this letter will appear on my blog at
http://gathatoulie.blogspot.com -- feel free to share it with any
interested parties.

I recently purchased "Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From
Theory to Practice" (MITP, 2006) and am thinking about buying
"Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing" (MITP, 2006).

Immediately when I bought the first of these titles, it struck me as
ironic that it was not available in an open access electronic format.

Upon further reflection, it seems somewhat strange to me that MITP is
not making an across-the-board effort to make its books available
online under terms permissive to use (open access), or perhaps novel
re-use (as would be permitted, for example, by a license like the "MIT
License" [1]).

MIT is famously already making a somewhat similar effort with course
materials [2]. It would be a great boon to low-income scholars and
readers around the world if MITP followed suit.

It would be easy to assert that this is impossible because of how much
revenue would be lost. I say: this is about access to knowledge, and
the moral issues here trump whatever issues adhere to publisher's
"bottom line".

Now, this does not mean I'd want to see you go out of business
implementing some kind of hare-brained scheme for open access!
Rather, I view "access to knowledge" as a policy problem -- one that I
hope the minds at MIT will take leadership to help solve.

[1]: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
[2]: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/terms-of-use.htm