Open Access Archivangelism

(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 fundee'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.)

(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 to require that all MIT researchers deposit, in MIT's IR, the final refereed drafts of all their journal articles, immediately upon acceptance for publication.

(6) In addition, MIT should encourage that all MIT researchers set access to each deposited full text as OA immediately upon deposit -- but leaving them the option of choosing instead to set access as Restricted Access (MIT-only, or author-only) if they wish, 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 only 7% will require the option of eprint emailing of RA deposits.)

(7) Having adopted this two-part deposit/access-setting policy as a mandate, MIT can then go on to its two proposed steps, of complying with the provisional NIH public access policy (by allowing harvesting at the appointed date from MIT's own IR into PubMed Central) and seeking an MIT consensus on copyright retention.

(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.

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:

"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.

"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 amendmentis closely related to the SPARC Author's Addendum 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.