As part of the dissemination activities undertaken during the Open Access Week 2012, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries have released a picture of the worldwide downloads from the MIT Faculty Open Access Articles Collection at their DSpace@MIT Institutional Repository, in the period from October 2010 to June 2012. The picture -which shows large rates of content usage- is included in the press release “The worldwide impact of open access to MIT faculty research”, where various examples of the relevance of the Open Access availability of the MIT research output are mentioned.

MIT is the first institution to have signed an agreement with the RepNet Repository Junction Broker (RJB) service – to shortly come into operation- in order to receive automated content transfers into their Open Access repository.

IRUS-UK, another RepNet service, will enable to offer similar usage statistics across the whole Institutional Repository Network in the UK, thus further making the case for Open Access.