Open Access NewsNews from the open access movement Jump to navigation |
|||
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. The MIT contract amendment is 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. |