MIT has proposed two OA policy steps: compliance with the NIH Public
Access Policy and seeking consensus on copyright retention:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/facmtg-post-mar15.html
http://libraries.mit.edu/about/scholarly/solutions.html#amendment
In the interests of brevity, clarity, and comprehension, I will be
(uncharacteristically) brief (8 points):
(1) The two steps taken by MIT are a very good thing, compared to
taking no steps at all, but:
(2) Step one, explicitly formalizing compliance with the current NIH
Public Access Policy, is a retrograde step, as it helps entrench
the flawed NIH policy in its present form (a request instead of a
requirement, a 6-12-month delay instead of immediate deposit, and
depositing in PubMed Central instead of in the author's own
Institutional Repository).
(3) Step two, seeking university-wide agreement on copyright
retention, is not a necessary prerequisite for OA self-archiving, and
there will be time-consuming resistance to it, from both publishers
and authors. Hence it is the wrong thing to target first at
this time. (University of California is making exactly the same mistake
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/57-guid.html ).
(4) What MIT should be doing is neither formalizing compliance with
the current NIH policy nor giving priority to copyright retention
(even though copyright retention is highly desirable).
(5) What MIT should be doing is *mandating* depositing, in MIT's IR,
the final refereed drafts of all journal articles by MIT researchers,
immediately upon acceptance for publication.
(6) In addition, MIT should *encourage* (not mandate) setting access
to each deposited full text as Open Access (OA) immediately upon
deposit -- leaving the author the choice of instead setting access
as Restricted Access (RA) (MIT-only, or author-only) and fulfilling
email eprints requests generated by the OA metadata by emailing the
eprint to the requester for the time being. (Ninety-three percent
of journals already endorse immediate OA self-archiving, so RA need
only be an option for 7%.)
(7) Having adopted that policy as a mandate, MIT can *then* go
on to its two proposed steps, of complying with the provisional
NIH public access policy (by arranging for harvesting at the
appointed date from the MIT archive into PubMed Central)
and seeking an MIT consensus on copyright retention.
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
(8) Instead going straight to (7) without first adopting and
implementing (5) and (6) is a huge (and unnecessary) strategic
mistake, and a bad model for other institutions to follow.
---------
Posted by Peter Suber in Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_03_19_fosblogarchive.html#114300158785661057
Two steps to support OA at MIT
At its March 15 faculty meeting, the MIT faculty discussed two
OA-related topics: complying with the NIH public access policy and
using an MIT amendment to modify standard publishing contracts and
let authors retain key rights. Details in today's report from the MIT
News Office:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/facmtg-post-mar15.html
http://libraries.mit.edu/about/scholarly/solutions.html#amendment
Concerned that taxpayer-funded research is not accessible to the
general public because of the tightly controlled, proprietary system
enforced by some journal publishers, the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) is asking every NIH-funded scientist who publishes results in
a peer-reviewed journal to deposit a digital copy of the article in
PubMed Central (PMC), the online digital library maintained by the
NIH. Not later than 12 months after the journal article appears,
PMC will then provide free online access to the public.
Director of Libraries Anne J. Wolpert and Vice President for
Research Alice Gast discussed with the faculty MIT's response to
this issue, which has been to support NIH researchers in complying
with the policy, and also to enable any MIT researcher to use a
more author-friendly copyright agreement when submitting articles
for publication. "The overwhelming majority of work produced by you
is licensed back to you, and you can't always use your own work in
the way you want to use it," Wolpert told the faculty. Copyright
exemptions that were carefully crafted to allow the academy to teach
and do research are steadily being superseded by intellectual property
regimes that were developed for the benefit of the entertainment
industry. "What Disney wants, the academy gets, whether it suits
your interests or not," Wolpert said.
Among the reasons for universities to support open access is the
high cost associated with renting access to journals, which for MIT
alone has grown in the past decade from $2.6 million to more than $6
million a year....
An amendment that can be attached to any publication's copyright
agreement was disseminated to principal investigators in February. "We
have to wait and see how this plays out and see what feedback
we get from publishers," Gast said. The goal is for MIT as an
institution to work out agreements with publishers rather than make
individual researchers fight their own battles. More information,
as well as the amendment, which would override the publisher's
copyright agreement, is available online and other MIT web sites.
http://libraries.mit.edu/about/scholarly/
"There is a distinct feeling among our counterparts at large private
and public institutions that if MIT takes a reasonable and principled
position on this issue, other institutions will be encouraged to do
likewise," Wolpert said.
PETER SUBER: The MIT contract amendment
http://libraries.mit.edu/about/scholarly/solutions.html#amendment
is closely related to the SPARC Author's Addendum
http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.html drafted for the same
purpose. The MIT amendment gives authors (among other things) the
non-exclusive right to copy and distribute their own article, to
make derivative works from it, and to deposit the final published
version in an OA repository. MIT is the first university I know to
present its faculty with a lawyer-drafted contract amendment for the
purpose of retaining the rights needed to provide OA to their own
work. Kudos to all involved. MIT faculty could change the default
for faculty with less bargaining power.
Posted in OA News by Peter Suber at 3/21/2006 10:41:00 PM.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_03_19_fosblogarchive.html#114300158785661057
Received on Wed Mar 22 2006 - 15:41:18 GMT