MIT Libraries News

On December 26, 2007, President Bush signed a spending bill that requires the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to mandate open online access to all research it funds.

This is the first mandate for a major public funding agency in the US that requires research to be openly available; it changes the 2005 NIH Public Access Policy, which requested, but did not require, open access to NIH-funded research.  

The new language stipulates that investigators funded by the NIH submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts to the National Library of Medicine’s open access repository PubMed Central when the manuscript is accepted for publication.  The manuscript would then become openly available via PubMed Central within 12 months of publication in a journal.  The policy will be implemented “in a manner consistent with copyright law.”

The mandate will apply to a vast amount of research. Aside from classified military research, the NIH is the world’s largest funder of scientific research, with a 2007 budget of $28 billion. According to open access commentator Peter Suber, NIH research funds ”65,000 peer-reviewed articles every year or 178 every day.”  At MIT, NIH funds account for about one-third of the research dollars awarded annually.

More information on the mandate is available from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and from Peter Suber.

If MIT authors have questions, please contact:Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries/ efinnie@mit.edu /x38483

The fourth episode in a new series of podcasts on various aspects of scholarly publishing & copyright is now available.

In this episode, we hear from Professor Kai von Fintel, Professor of Linguistics at MIT, whose research areas are in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, and the intersections among them.

Professor von Fintel discusses the launch of a new open access journal, Semantics and Pragmatics, with co-editor David Beaver of the University of Texas at Austin. The podcast was recorded at a critical moment in the journal’s history, a few weeks after its website was launched and opened for submissions, and a few months before the first papers are expected to appear there, in early 2008.

Download the Audio File (11:11 minutes; 10.3MB)

More information about Professor von Fintel’s open access journal is available at the Semantic and Pragmatics website, which includes a blog by the editors. A previous MIT Libraries’ blog story also contains more information.

The other episodes in the podcast series are available on the scholarly publication website.

To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader:

http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/

This is the first series of podcasts created by the Libraries specifically for this format. We encourage and welcome your feedback as the series evolves. If you have any feedback, please direct it to:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu
Nicole Hennig / Web Manager / hennig@mit.edu

Professor Wai Cheng writes about “The Pitfalls of Digital Rights Management” in the November/December issue of the MIT Faculty Newsletter.

Professor Cheng, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), spoke out last spring against the limitations of digital rights management (DRM) technology being imposed on access to research published by the SAE through a web-based database of technical papers accessed at MIT through an MIT Libraries’ subscription.

He felt strongly enough about the implications of DRM that he delivered a presentation to the SAE’s Publication Board meeting in April 2007, making a case that the SAE should revoke the new DRM requirement. His presentation resulted in SAE’s immediate stay in implementation of DRM for universities, followed by the appointment of a task force to more fully examine the issue.

The outcome, as announced in an SAE press release this month, is that “As recommended by a special task force, the SAE International Publications Board voted Oct. 31 to eliminate the use of the ‘FileOpen’ plug-in on digital library products for … colleges, universities and other academic institutions.” This means that “In 2008 students and faculty will be able to use SAE International’s Digital Library of Technical Papers in academic settings without the former restrictions.”

Many thanks to Professor Cheng for his efforts to secure flexible access rights to SAE’s papers for MIT and other universities.

Please note that the MIT Libraries canceled web access to the SAE papers last year in response to the imposition of DRM. Information on current access to the papers is available at the Barker Library’s web site.

For more information on MIT faculty who are taking action to improve access to research, see the scholarly publication website.

–Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / x38483 / efinnie@mit.edu

This hands-on workshop will help graduate students learn tools that measure journal quality, publisher copyright policies, and their significance to you as an author. Includes concise overviews of:

• Measures of journal quality, including ISI impact factor and other indicators
• Copyright law as related to journal publishing (transferring copyright)
• Publisher copyright policies, including rights for posting your work on the web
• Publishing options: open access channels, in both new and traditional journals, and other types of publishing

When: Friday November 16, 2007, 11am-12pm
Where: 14N-132
Presented by: Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing  & Licensing Consultant, MIT Libraries, efinnie@mit.edu
Sponsored by: The GSC-ARC and the MIT Libraries

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the MIT Libraries, and the nonprofit organization ScienceCommons are co-sponsoring a discussion of open access and the progress of science:

WHEN: Tuesday, November 13; 3:15 pm - 5:00 pm

WHERE: Kiva (Room 449) — Stata Center

With presentations by:
John Wilbanks (Vice President, Science Commons)

Anna Gold (Head, Engineering and Science Libraries, MIT)

and Moderated by Professor Hal Abelson (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT)

More on ScienceCommons

More on Open Access

If you have any questions about the event, please contact:

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / x38483

The third episode in a new series of podcasts on various aspects of scholarly publishing & copyright is now available.

In the new episode, we hear from Professor Eric von Hippel, T Wilson Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. He specializes in research related to the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation.

Professor von Hippel speaks about his experiment with making two of his books openly available on his website at no cost to the reader, and about the broader issue of how the economics of innovation are increasingly favoring open, unrestricted internet access, including in scholarly publishing.

Download the Audio File (8:33 minutes)

More information about Professor von Hippel’s experiment with making his books openly available on the web was offered in a previous story.

The other episodes in the podcast series are available on the scholarly publication website.

To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader:

http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/

This is the first series of podcasts created by the Libraries specifically for this format. We encourage and welcome your feedback as the series evolves. If you have any feedback, please direct it to:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu
Nicole Hennig / Web Manager / hennig@mit.edu

Last night the US Senate approved the Appropriations Bill that strengthens the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy,  requiring NIH-sponsored research to be made openly available on the internet without barriers to access.

The new language requires NIH-funded researchers to deposit copies of manuscripts into PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s openly accessible archive, where they will be made available within 12 months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal.   (Existing language requests, rather than requires, this posting in PubMed Central, and has resulted in a deposit rate of less than 5% by investigators.)

The Senate’s action represents another key hurdle in the process of making publicly funded research publicly accessible.   Next, the language of the Senate bill (S.1710) has to be reconciled with similar language in a House Appropriations Bill.  This is expected to be worked out this fall.   The final consolidated bill will then have to pass the House and Senate before it goes to the President at the end of the year.

The Treasurer of the American Society for Cell Biology, Gary Ward, has responded to this Senate vote by saying that “We welcome the NIH policy being made mandatory, and thank Congress for backing this important step.  Free and timely public access to scientific literature is necessary to ensure that new discoveries are made as quickly as feasible. It’s the right thing to do, given that taxpayers funds this research.”  (The Alliance for Taxpayer Access’ press release offers the full context of this quote.)

More about the NIH Public Access Policy may be found on the Open Access Initiatives page of the Scholarly Publication Website.

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing & Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / efinnie@mit.edu / x38483

Stuart Shieber, Harvard professor of computer science, introduced a motion to the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences on October 16 that would have the faculty uniformly grant a non-exclusive, limited license to Harvard to post their scholarly and research articles openly on the web.   

The final version of the motion has not been completed, but if passed, research articles authored by members of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences would be made freely available on the web, without permission or payment barriers to the reader, effectively making Harvard faculty work “open access.” 

While this proposal is not university-wide (it does not, for example, cover the professional schools such as the medical, law, or business schools), it would apply to the entire Harvard College faculty, including every discipline studied by undergraduates, as well as the graduate school of arts & sciences, and the school of engineering and applied sciences. 

Professor Shieber has been working on this issue for at least two years.  He’s convinced that university-level action is needed to enhance open access to research, for while individual faculty can make a difference in negotiating their own publication contracts, institutional policies will simplify the copyright and pragmatic issues faced when each individual is responsible for making his or her work openly accessible. 

To take effect, the motion will need to be discussed further by the faculty and voted upon by the full faculty.  Final details of the policy are not yet available, since it is still under discussion. 

Related Efforts at MIT

Here at MIT, Professor of Geophysics Brian Evans has drafted a resolution under the auspices of the Faculty Committee on the Library System that addresses the same desire for open access to research that underlies the Harvard motion.  The draft resolution states that “Broad dissemination and rapid, free flow of information is essential to insuring vigorous intellectual debate and efficient progress in any academic field, humanistic, engineering or scientific; is a key ingredient in providing for informed public debate of critical social problems; and is an obligation for researchers receiving public funding” and it calls for MIT faculty to “support the general concept of open access, especially for publicly funded research, and recommend the use of the least restrictive copyright agreements, consistent with the academic and commercial intent under which the research was undertaken.” 

Professor Evans spoke about the resolution at an IAP event in January 2007.   More information on open access is available on the scholarly publishing web site or by contacting the Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant, Ellen Finnie Duranceau (efinnie@mit.edu).

A new MIT Libraries’ tutorial “Scholarly Publication and Copyright: Retaining Rights & Increasing the Impact of Research” is now available online.

• Part 1 focuses on how copyright law intersects with the publication process.

Download part 1 (5:38 min.)

• Part 2 reviews why you might want to retain rights when you publish and how you can do so.

Download Part 2 (9:47 min.)

• Part 3 provides information on increasing the impact of your research by making it available through open access channels.

Download Part 3 (8:55 min.)

Together, these three parts are intended to explain how copyright relates to publication agreements for research articles, and how authors can increase the impact of their work by negotiating to retain rights to post their articles on the web or reuse them in other ways.

This 3-part tutorial is also linked from the scholarly publishing website, where these themes are developed in more depth.

We welcome your comments and feedback, which can be directed to:

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu / 617.253.8483

The MIT Libraries are offering a new podcast series on scholarly publishing and copyright. Two episodes are available:

In “Transforming Scientific Communication,” Steve Gass, Head of Public Services, describes some problems with the existing model for scholarly publishing and offers his vision of positive changes that could be made.

Download the audio file. (6:27 minutes, 6 Mb)

In “Making a Difference: Pushing Back on DRM at MIT,” Anna Gold, Head of the Engineering and Science Libraries, tells the story of MIT’s rejection of Digital Rights Management technology when it was being imposed by a scholarly society for use of its technical papers here at MIT.

Download the audio file. (8:18 minutes, 7.7 Mb)

To subscribe to the MIT Libraries’ Podcasts on Scholarly Publishing, paste this link into iTunes or another podcast reader:

http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/6772/

This is the first series of podcasts created by the Libraries specifically for this format. We encourage and welcome your feedback as the series evolves.

Please direct your comments to:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / efinnie@mit.edu
Nicole Hennig / Web Manager / hennig@mit.edu

For more information on scholarly publishing & copyright, please visit the Libraries’ Scholarly Publication website.

Two new tools make finding key information about journals easier, providing authors with support for decisions about where to publish and offering information about what they can do with their work once they publish. Both tools were announced this month and are open for testing and comment.

Journal Info

The first tool, Journal Info, includes access, cost, and quality information for 18,000 journals. Journal Info is intended to support researchers in their choice of journal for publication. It offers access, cost, and quality information, and also indicates if there is an open access alternative to a given title.

Some of the data points offered for each journal are:

• Allowance of self-archiving [by author] of reviewed manuscript
• Subscription price per article and per citation
• Profit or not-for-profit status
• Publication fees
• Quality measures, including where the journal is indexed, the ISI Impact Factor, and a new impact factor measure called the Journal eigenfactor, which is sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the University of Washington’s Biology Department.

Journal Info was created by Lund University Libraries (with financial support from the National Library of Sweden). Lund also created the Directory of Open Access Journals, a resource that identifies scientific and scholarly journals that make their content accessible to readers without legal or subscription barriers.

HHMI Journal Publishing Policy Database

The second tool was built by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to support their authors in meeting the terms of the new HHMI open access mandate. This tool was developed by HHMI “as a convenience to HHMI scientists and their collaborators around the world” and offers “a searchable resource with information about the policies and author responsibilities for 50 high-impact journals,” principally in biomedicine.

Some of the data points offered for each title are:

• Full Text Access [how, when & where articles are made openly available]
• Author Role/Responsibility [in relation to the HHMI policy]
• Publisher Role [in relation to the HHMI policy]
• Journal Publishing Policy [a link to copyright, posting, and related policies]

The HHMI public access policy summary database was created and is maintained by the library staff at the HHMI library.

More on Choosing Journals

For more information about evaluating journal copyright and publishing policies, please contact:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / efinnie@mit.edu / x38483

WHERE: 14N-132 (Digital Instruction Resource Center – DIRC)

WHEN: Friday, July 13, noon – 1pm

Can you use and re-use your own work for future writing and teaching? Or is it locked tight behind a vault of copyright restrictions?

This session will help you find the keys to fully realize the potential of your own work for yourself and the world. It will provide a very brief summary of copyright law and how it affects your work, and an overview of actions you can take to improve the impact and reach of your research – including why retaining rights to your work matters, and how you can take advantage of such rights to increase citation and readership.

Feel free to bring your lunch! Drinks and dessert will be provided.

Sponsored by the MIT Libraries.

Contact the Science Library for more information.

Full schedule of JulyAP 2007 information workshops

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a non-profit medical research organization that invests $700 million per year in research, has announced that it will require its investigators to publish their original research articles in scientific journals that allow the articles to be made freely accessible in a public repository within six months of publication.

Which Researchers are Covered by the New Policy? 

The policy affects more than 300 HHMI researchers. These researchers are located not only at the HHMI’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Virginia, but also at many universities (including MIT) and research organizations (such as the Massachusetts General Hospital) throughout the United States.  

HHMI investigators are selected in a competitive process. Once selected, they are considered HHMI employees, but continue to be based at their home institutions and lead research from those institutions.

While the policy applies to HHMI investigators regardless of their physical location, it does not apply to HHMI grantees.  HHMI focuses its grant support on undergraduate educational efforts which do not directly relate to this publication policy.

When Does it Take Effect, and What if a Publisher Does Not Agree?

The policy applies to manuscripts submitted on or after January 1, 2008, for papers where an HHMI investigator is a major author. HHMI will require investigators to look for another publisher if a publisher will not allow open access on HHMI’s terms.

Where Does the Work Get Shared?

If the publication is in the biological or biomedical sciences, it must be made available through the National Library of Medicine’s open archive PubMed Central within six months of publication; for other disciplines, the policy states that comparable repositories should be used if available.

What’s New or Different About This Policy?

This mandate has several unusual aspects:

• It’s the first open access mandate from a research funder in the United States. (The Wellcome Trust and others in the UK already have mandates; in the US, the NIH has a request that is not yet a requirement.)
• HHMI will provide HHMI authors with a custom interface for uploading their manuscripts to PubMed Central for those journals who do not provide that service.
• HHMI is working on arrangements with some publishers (e.g. Elsevier) to fund publisher charges involved in making the articles openly accessible.  (In other cases, investigators will be asked to use their operating budgets to pay any applicable charges.)

For More Information

More details are available at HHMI’s website , including a searchable database of journal titles and publishers indicating how the policies of 50 high-impact journals relate to the new mandate.

For more about what this means for scholarly publishing or for MIT authors, please contact:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / efinnie@mit.edu / x38483.

The Alliance for Taxpayer access announced yesterday that the Senate Appropriations Committee has agreed to direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to require that research it funds be made directly available on the Internet without barriers to access. Articles would have to made available no later than 12 months after publication, through the National Library of Medicine’s freely accessible online archive PubMed Central.

Existing Policy

If this new policy were to go into effect, it would change the existing 2005 NIH Public Access Policy, in which submission of articles to PubMed Central is requested, but not required. The voluntary policy has not resulted in significant submissions; fewer than 5% of eligible manuscripts have been deposited.

Steps Needed to Take Effect

The new policy faces several steps before it would take effect. It would need approval by the Senate (in the FY08 Senate Appropriations Bill), approval of a similar bill by the House, reconciliation of these two bills, and then the signature of the President.

More Information

More information on this recent Senate approval is available from the ATA press release.

More information about open access goals and efforts is available from the scholarly publishing website, or by contacting:

 Ellen Finnie Duranceau / Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / efinnie@mit.edu / x38483.

SPARC  (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) announced yesterday that they are hosting the first “SPARC Discovery Awards.” 

Contestants are “asked to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively show the benefits of bringing down barriers to the free exchange of information.”   

The contest was inspired by these words from George Bernard Shaw: “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

More on: Contest details

More on: the benefits of open sharing of ideas and research

Or: contact the MIT Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant:

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / efinnie@mit.edu / x38483

What’s the big deal about open access anyway? If I’m writing an article, what rights should I keep? Where can I find out more?

Check out http://libraries.mit.edu/open-access to find out what’s happening nationally and beyond, and http://libraries.mit.edu/rights to find out how to retain your rights and increase the impact of your research.

Look for these posters showing current Open Access Models at the Engineering and Science Libraries (Barker, Hayden, Lindgren and Aero/Astro).

A recent collection from MIT Press offers perspectives on the ways knowledge acts as a shared socio-ecological system — or commons — and suggests how authors can participate in that commons to disseminate research as swiftly, broadly, and inexpensively as possible.

Among the perspectives:

• James Boyle (professor of law, Duke University) works to identify the potential impact of “free, decentralized access to most cultural and scientific material.” He argues that “the traditions of the academy, of scholarship…dictate that openness in both content and structure should be our baseline, deviations from which require justification.”

• Peter Suber (professor of philosophy, Earlham College, and director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge) makes a case for “creating an intellectual commons through open access,” focusing OA efforts on research literature that does not generate royalties, and is shared through a digital commons system that is “nonrivalrous” – one that is not diminished or depleted by use. He discusses the central role of authors in achieving an OA commons, and how to sufficiently support authors to promote its development.

• Charles Schweik (professor of natural resources and public policy, UMass, Amherst) provides a history of open source software “as a framework for establishing a commons in science.” He places his discussion in the context of a long history of “open science,” a history that began in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

In his chapter, Peter Suber summarizes why the idea of a knowledge commons matters to the academy. OA is “about accelerating research and saving money,” but it “is also about freedom from needless barriers, fairness to taxpayers, returning control of scholarship to scholars, de-enclosing a commons, and serving the underserved.”

As an MIT author, if you have questions about maximizing the reach and influence of your work by participating in this knowledge commons, visit the scholarly publishing website, or contact the Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant:

Ellen Finnie Duranceau / x38483 / efinnie@mit.edu.

If you would like to read the book:

Borrow from the MIT Libraries

Buy from MIT Press

Buy from amazon.com

If you would like to read more about the concept of the commons (including a separate thread on the commons in academia, which includes comments about this book) see the “creativity and knowledge” section of the blog OnTheCommons.

New Open Access Journal in Linguistics
MIT Professor of Linguistics Kai von Fintel (pictured below) and his colleague David Beaver (Univ. of Texas at Austin) have announced the launch of a new peer-reviewed open access journal in linguistics, called Semantics & Pragmatics. The journal’s launch was announced at the annual meeting of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) on May 13, 2007, at the University of Connecticut. A call for papers is expected in September 2007, and the first articles are expected to appear in early 2008.

The goal of the new journal is to reach the widest possible audience as quickly as possible, while maintaining a formal peer-review process and allowing authors to maintain control over their own work. Semantics & Pragmatics will ask authors to allow the journal a non-exclusive right to publish, while leaving copyright ownership with the author.

The editors see Semantics & Pragmatics as offering the “next step in the scientific publishing revolution,” following the transition that has taken place in Linguistics, where the primary distribution channel for new research results is now preprint servers and authors’ web pages.

Business Plan
Some of the significant aspects of the business plan:

• Start-up Funding: The editors are seeking institutional support for the start-up phase. The MIT Libraries will be providing partial funding for the first year through a modest grant.
• Publishing Software: The editors plan to use open source software from Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University.
• Archiving: The journal plans to make arrangements for archiving through discussions with the Libraries’ Dspace team and is examining services for e-journal archiving such as Portico. They plan to offer an annual volume through a print-on-demand service for those who would like the print as an archival format.

Blogging the Start-up Process
Beaver and von Fintel will be blogging the entire start-up process, offering a unique inside view of the business of starting up an open access journal. To follow their progress, visit the editors’ blog.
_____

If you have questions about open access journals please visit the Libraries’ FAQ on open access or contact:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant, MIT Libraries
617.253.8483 / efinnie@mit.edu

Eric von Hippel is T Wilson Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. He specializes in research related to the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. Recently he spoke with Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant in the MIT Libraries, about his own innovation in publishing. He made two of his books available openly on his website at no cost to the reader: Democratizing Innovation, published in 2005 by the MIT Press, and Sources of Innovation, published in 1988 by Oxford University Press.

Libraries: What motivated you to make your books openly available, and to what extent was your motivation a direct result of the subject of your research? EVH: My whole purpose – doing all of my research – is not to get money from book royalties. That’s not my goal. I’m trying to diffuse my work and ideas, much the way MIT does with OpenCourseWare. Society is already paying me for my work via my research funding. Libraries: So your motivation to make the book openly available was not so much directly related to your work in open innovation? EVH: Only in the sense that I probably knew more about how to make a free downloading option work because of my research – I knew about Creative Commons licensing, for example, while many people are not aware of that option. Libraries: What was involved in making the arrangements with the two publishers? EVH: For Sources of Innovation, Oxford University Press made a special deal with me. I approached them about 15 years after my book was initially published. Oxford agreed I could post the book for downloading, but they required that I make some compensation to them for any significant decline in sales. If the sales remained stable, we’d be even. I did not end up having to pay them any money. In the case of Democratizing Innovation, I worked with MIT Press from the start to be sure I would have the right to offer my book on my website. In that case, I kept copyright to the book, and gave MIT Press the right to publish the printed version. This is why I was able to post the book under the CreativeCommons license. Libraries: What has the impact been, both in terms of downloads from the site, and on sales of hard copies of the books? EVH: There have been 12,700 downloads of Sources of Innovation since I put it on the web last year, running about 20 per day. Sales before posting in 2005 (the book was published in 1988) were about 325 per year. In the year after posting, they were about 575. Democratizing Innovation has been downloaded 55,000 times so far, with downloads from my MIT website running about 50 per day. I don’t think this has hurt hard copy sales – and it actually may have helped. MIT Press told me that hardcopy sales are higher than their pre-pub estimate of what they would have been without the option of free downloads. Libraries: So by your estimates, sales of Sources of Innovation went up well over 70% after you made the book openly downloadable, and you believe at least some of the sales of Democratizing Innovation were the result of the open access version. It would seem these numbers would please MIT Press and Oxford University Press. What have the publishers’ reactions been? EVH: It’s counterintuitive for publishers that they will sell more books if copies can be downloaded for free. So Oxford thought the result was really great. I’m not sure they’ve altered their business model based on the results, but they were pleased. In the case of MIT Press, my book was their first real experiment with this model. Because sales were higher than otherwise expected, they have begun to experiment with offering this option to other authors. Libraries: The MIT Press confirms that the experiment was very successful. Here’s what Ellen Faran, Director of MIT Press, shared with me about your book: “In order to establish a benchmark for the experiment, we projected the number of copies we would expect to sell in the traditional paid environment during the first year of publication: 3,000 copies, and let me assure you, in our world that’s a big number representing a successful book. The results [in the first] 10 months after publication: excellent reviews and publicity attention, hardcover sales of over 4,800 copies, and more than 31,000 visitors to the web sites where downloads are available. The reception for this book dramatically exceeded our initial expectations.” Ellen Faran also points out that “we will never know if, without the free PDF, we might have sold 7-8,000 copies” but that “the experiment shows indisputably that, for this one title, open text and paid print may happily co-exist.” So MIT Press’ expectations have been exceeded. What have your colleagues and readers’ reactions been? EVH: The colleagues and readers I have heard from thank me. They appreciate having free access. But I think for many people the physical book is still very important. And some people have told me that they liked the book so much after downloading it, they felt they owed it to me to buy a copy, so they did. Others just liked the book so much, they wanted a bound copy. I have found that my readers appreciate that I not only talk the talk, but walk the walk with respect to encouraging the growth of the information commons. That’s really important to me. Libraries: What do you think keeps authors from trying what you’ve tried? EVH: Most authors don’t know that this is possible. They don’t have a model in mind for how they might offer their book openly this way. And for young authors, they are not willing to fight with publishers to make this kind of arrangement – they are so eager to be published. Libraries: You make some of your working papers available on your web site and in MIT’s research repository, DSpace. Have you made systematic efforts to post articles you’ve authored? EVH: I’d like to put more of my papers on my website and in DSpace, but I haven’t gotten around to it lately. Thanks for the gentle suggestion . Libraries: Democratizing Innovation is dedicated to “all who are building the information commons.” Do you have any closing words of wisdom for those who are hoping to support this vision here at MIT? EVH: There is good reason to think that information placed in the information commons enhances both social and private welfare. Specifically in the case of academia, studies indicate that freely-downloadable academic papers get significantly increased diffusion and citations, other things being equal. ***** If you have questions about this story, or about retaining rights to make your work openly available, please contact: Ellen Finnie Duranceau Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / x38484 / efinnie@mit.edu Download Eric von Hippel’s books from his web page. Borrow Democratizing Innovation from the MIT Libraries. Borrow Sources of Innovation from the MIT Libraries. Review purchase options for Democratizing Innovation. Review purchase options for Sources of Innovation.

The Libraries’ IAP panel on authors’ rights and access to research is now available as a videotape for free viewing over the internet. The panel examines how MIT authors can take actions that will increase the impact of their own work, and serve the advancement of science and technology by maximizing the full potential of research to be shared and reused.

The speakers (in order pictured) include:

Ann Wolpert : Director, MIT Libraries
Thinh Nguyen: Science Commons Counsel
Brian Evans: EAPS Professor of Geophysics
Ellen Duranceau: MIT Libraries Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant
Ann Hammersla: MIT Intellectual Property Counsel
Claude Canizares: Associate Provost

Summary Adapted From MIT World:

	Ann Wolpert’s panel should set off alarm bells among academics who imagine they may enter blithely into a publishing agreement in the digital age.
	Claude Canizares sets the stage, describing the transformative changes in academic publishing: the disappearance of a paper-driven industry (with limited and controlled copies of authors’ works) and the emergence of internet publishing, “where anything goes.” The inexorable consolidation of academic publishers has allowed “relatively small numbers to exert significant control.” This leads to conflict with institutions like MIT, whose mission is research and the untrammeled dissemination of knowledge. Canizares himself has been subject to copyright agreements that limit his ability to use his own work. “We’d like to make it much easier for authors,” says Canizares.
	The archives of Britain’s Royal Society going back 350 years are available online today, says Thinh Nguyen, “but the catch is, you have to be a current subscriber to download” this content. Newton’s article on the invention of the telescope costs $9. “This is the essence of the current model: a gated community of information.” Nguyen’s Science Commons enterprise attempts to reduce legal barriers to scientific research. For instance, he hopes to allow internet users to conduct software searches of online journals—currently prohibited by many publishers. Nguyen encourages scientists who publish to consider alternatives to signing over copyright to publishers without first attempting to negotiate the terms of ownership.
	In her job as intellectual property overseer for MIT, Ann Hammersla works to retain as many rights for authors as she can. She’s engaged in the challenging job of working out arrangements with publishers that enable authors to use their own materials in future work, in their classrooms, and to publish on the internet after first publishing in print. She sees an increasing demand by private and government funders for public posting of authors’ works, a demand that runs directly counter to the copyright agreements publishers insist on.
	The best way forward for individual scientific authors, declares Ellen Finnie Duranceau, is through “collective and institutional action.” Together, authors must demand in their publisher agreements the right to “share work as widely as possible,” which will increase their readership and citation rate; and the right to reuse their work flexibly, and to authorize others to use their work. Duranceau discusses “chilling stories,” including an MIT faculty member who gave a publisher copyright to his own hand-drawn maps, and then could not use them on his MIT OpenCourseWare site. Duranceau recommends an MIT amendment to copyright transfer agreements that entitles authors more access to their own work, and more access by others through public repositories.
	Brian Evans sees an imbalance, where researchers and universities “are being preyed on by large companies.” Researchers lose rights to their own work, and libraries pay excessively for journals: Says Evans, for “every $10 thousand we pay to a publishing company, it’s $10 thousand we can’t do something else with at the Institute.” He exhorts his colleagues “to consider publishing in public access journals or starting one in your own field,” and to reduce copyright restrictions through individual negotiations. Most of all, faculty should come together to work toward uniform standards.

The video service is provided by MIT World, MIT’s free and open site, which provides on-demand video of significant public events at MIT. The videotape is about one hour and forty minutes in length, but a viewer can select specific tracks, identified and described at the site.

If you have any questions about the panel or the topics it addresses, please contact:
Ellen Finnie Duranceau
Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant / MIT Libraries / 617.253.8483 / efinnie@mit.edu
or see: The Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing Website