The MIT is launching a new way for authors of scholarly articles to legally hold onto rights to reuse and post their articles, and for others to more easily build on that work. As of this month, all MIT authors, including students, postdocs, and staff, can opt in to an open access license. The initiative is the results of the efforts of Cara Manning PhD '16, the MIT Libraries, and many others across the Institute.
Publishing rights are something scholarly researchers cannot take for granted. The high-profile chemistry journal that Manning and her co-authors chose to publish their article, for example, was typical of academic journals in that it required they sign over their copyright. In doing so, the authors lost rights to use their work, except in ways prescribed by the publisher. The MIT Faculty Open Access Policy would have neatly accommodated this problem, but it applies only to MIT faculty or their co-authors. Manning was neither.
Frustrated, she approached the MIT Libraries, which implements the faculty open access policy, and asked: How can we make an open access policy that applies to students? The answer was far from simple.
According to Ellen Finnie, head of scholarly communications and collections strategy at the MIT Libraries, MIT authors who were not faculty had long desired a policy so they would be more assured of their rights to share their work. But there was no clear path to extend the policy to those authors. The faculty adopted the policy in 2009 as a faculty policy, and they were not positioned to create a blanket policy for other groups at MIT. There were governance questions about who could create a policy that would apply by default for graduate students.
After Manning and Finnie met in 2015, Finnie and attorney Jay Wilcoxson from the Office of General Counsel came up with the idea for an opt-in license — a voluntary agreement that an individual MIT author can sign and that applies to scholarly articles written while at MIT. The opt-in language mirrors that of the faculty policy and was vetted across campus by groups including the Office of General Counsel, Faculty Policy Committee, Committee on Intellectual Property, and Graduate Student Council, which has long supported making student work more accessible to the public. The license can be used by authors who are employed by, have an academic instructional staff or academic research staff (e.g., postdoc) appointment from, or are registered as a student at MIT, and applies to articles written while at the Institute.
While she was pushing for open access at MIT, Manning, who graduated in October, was also working with librarians at Woods Hole on an open access policy for WHOI researchers that was announced last month.
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