Open Access at MIT
Posted by John Baez
This Thursday, MIT followed the initiative of that lesser-known school up the river and decided to insist that all their research be made freely accessible online!
Here’s their new policy:
MIT Faculty Open-Access Policy
Passed Unanimously by the Faculty, March 18, 2009
The Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs MIT of the reason.
To assist the Institute in distributing the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each Faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the Provost’s Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office.
The Provost’s Office will make the scholarly article available to the public in an open- access repository. The Office of the Provost, in consultation with the Faculty Committee on the Library System will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty.
The policy is to take effect immediately; it will be reviewed after five years by the Faculty Policy Committee, with a report presented to the Faculty.
The Faculty calls upon the Faculty Committee on the Library System to develop and monitor a plan for a service or mechanism that would render compliance with the policy as convenient for the faculty as possible.
Re: Open Access at MIT
I applaud open access initiatives, but to me it looks like they are asking authors to give up too much of their copyright.
“In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same.”
Why do they need *all* rights under copyright rather than just the right to distribute the article? For example, this would presumably include the right to create derivative works, which could well conflict with the transfer of copyright agreements of even the most reasonable publishers. Also, why do they need the right to authorize others to do the same? Surely that should still be the prerogative of the author.
Compare with the arXiv.org license, which essentially just says:
# I grant arXiv.org a perpetual, non-exclusive license to distribute this article.
# I certify that I have the right to grant this license.
with the rest of the license being irrelevant to copyright issues. Surely this is all that is needed.
We should be wary of institutions using open access as an excuse to demand too many rights over publications from their faculty.