(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.
Comment. (i) I agree that the current NIH policy is flawed. But while we work on strengthening the policy, it's better for researchers to comply than not to comply. Researchers can deposit the same articles in their institutional repository, if they like. When PubMed Central is set up to harvest grantee articles from IRs, then we can recommend that grantees deposit in their IRs instead of, rather than in addition to, PMC. (ii) The MIT contract amendment does not seek to "retain copyright" for authors, only to retain the rights needed for OA and a few other important scholarly uses. It's true that authors don't need to retain full copyright in order to consent to OA, and it's true that most journals already give permission for postprint archiving (without the need for special negotiations or contract language). But something like the MIT contract amendment is needed for those journals that do not already permit postprint archiving. (iii) I fully support Stevan's recommendations in ##5-6.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/23/2006 10:24:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
