This academic political controversy brought to you by DSpace

Article title, "MIT to make all faculty publications open access"

To quote, "If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access."

and

"The faculty will have to prepare an appropriately formatted copy of their works to the provost for hosting. MIT plans to place them on its DSpace system, a content hosting system it developed with HP and distributes under a BSD license."

This is actually huge news, particularly for academic researchers AND for users and admins of DSpace. I'm hoping this will mean that a lot more funding gets kicked toward DSpace, Inc. Granted, MIT is the institution that built DSpace, but this is the core reason it was created. I'm really eager to see what the future will bring in regard to this.