MIT Libraries News

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

In response to faculty requests, this new, concise overview of information about retaining rights when publishing is now available on the MIT Libraries’ scholarly publishing website:

Why retain rights?

• Many publishers create significant barriers for authors who want to reuse or share their work, and for access to that work by others. Negotiating changes to standard publisher agreements can help authors avoid these obstacles, thus increasing options for authors as well as readership, citation, and impact of the work itself. (Openly available articles have been shown to be more heavily cited.)
• Publishers routinely change the agreements they ask authors to sign. If you have not secured rights you want as an author, the publisher may alter its practices over time.
• Making research and scholarship as widely available as possible supports MIT’s mission of “generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges.”
• Some research funders request or require that work created with their funds be made available openly on the web. Their policies can be reviewed at the Juliet site. Other institutions also have open access policies or mandates.

Which rights to retain?

• MIT authors are often most interested in retaining rights to:

• Reuse their work in teaching, future publications, and in all scholarly and professional activities.
• Post their work on the web (sometimes referred to as “self-archiving”), e.g. in Dspace, MIT’s research repository; in a discipline archive (such as PubMed Central or arXiv); or on a web page.

How to retain rights?

• Authors should specify the rights they want to retain, as most publishers do not extend these rights to authors in their standard agreements.
• One simple way to retain rights is to use the MIT Copyright Amendment Form.
• This form enables authors to continue using their publications in their academic work; to deposit them into DSpace; and to deposit them into any discipline-based research repository (including PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s database for NIH-funded manuscripts).

Which publishers are likely to be flexible about these rights?

• Publisher policies and agreements vary considerably. The Romeo database offers a convenient summary of many publisher copyright and self-archiving policies.
• Publisher policies and agreements are usually linked from the author information or article submission section of a journal’s website.
• Publisher policies change over time, and the terms stated on their websites often vary from the terms of their actual agreements, so it is important to read the agreement itself.

Where do I go with questions about these issues?

• The Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant, Ellen Finnie Duranceau: efinnie@mit.edu / 617.253.8483
• The Libraries’ scholarly publishing website

The MIT Libraries have canceled access to the Society of Automotive Engineers’ web-based database of technical papers, rejecting the SAE’s requirement that MIT accept the imposition of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology.

SAE’s DRM technology severely limits use of SAE papers and imposes unnecessary burdens on readers. With this technology, users must download a DRM plugin, FileOpen Systems’ third-party plug-in for Adobe Reader called “FileOpen,” in order to read SAE papers. This plugin limits use to on-screen viewing and making a single printed copy, and does not work on Linux or Unix platforms.

Latest SAE self-help guide for how to locate and how to request SAE documents.

MIT faculty respond

“It’s a step backwards,” says Professor Wai Cheng, SAE fellow and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, who feels strongly enough about the implications of DRM that he has asked to be added to the agenda of the upcoming SAE Publication Board meeting in April, when he will address this topic.

In addition to Professor Cheng, the MIT Libraries consulted with other faculty members who publish or use SAE content. The responses were uniformly against accepting DRM, even if it meant losing ready access to SAE papers. When informed that the SAE feels the need to impose DRM to protect their intellectual property, Professor John Heywood, the Director of MIT’s Sloan Automotive Lab, who publishes his own work with the SAE, responded with a question: “Their intellectual property?” He commented that increasingly strict and limiting restrictions on use of papers that are offered to publishers for free is causing faculty to become less willing to “give it all away” when they publish.

Echoing Professor Heywood, Alan Epstein, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, believes that “If SAE limits exposure to their material and makes it difficult for people to get it, faculty will choose to publish elsewhere.” He noted that “SAE is a not-for-profit organization and should be in this for the long term,” rather than imposing high prices and heavy restrictions to maximize short-term profit.

Reducing access to research

At a time when technology makes it possible to share research more quickly and broadly than ever before, and when innovative automotive research is a matter of global concern, SAE is limiting access to the research that has been entrusted to the society. In addition to imposing DRM on access to the papers for paid subscribers, the SAE also prevents information about its papers from being found through any channel other than the ones they control.

What does this mean? In contrast to information about research published by other engineering societies, which can be found in databases such as Google, ISI’s Web of Science, or the Compendex engineering database, information about SAE papers is only made available through SAE’s proprietary database. Such policies severely limit access to information about SAE papers, and are out of step with market norms.

New arrangements for access to SAE content at MIT

While MIT faculty, the MIT Libraries, and MIT’s Office of Information Services & Technology all agree that SAE’s imposition of DRM is unacceptable in our environment, the Libraries nevertheless recognize that it is important to provide some level of ongoing access to SAE papers needed by the MIT community. The Libraries are therefore working on a new access arrangement.

Beginning in April, 2007, the Libraries will make available either a printed or web-based index of SAE papers; once a citation is identified in this index, the paper will be accessible through one of three channels, depending on its publication date:

• SAE papers published prior to 2004 will be available either in print or on microfiche in the Barker Engineering Library.
• SAE papers published in 2004, 2005, or 2006 will be available either in print or on CD-ROM in the Barker Engineering Library.
• SAE papers from the current year will be made available on request through a web form.

The Libraries are working to ensure that this system will be in place in time to avoid major disruption to MIT users when the SAE Digital Library access ends March 31. We regret that CD-ROM and on-demand access will not be as convenient for the MIT community as the full-text, web-based access has been.

Before taking this step, the Libraries spent several months weighing options, consulting with faculty and IS&T experts, and in conversation with the SAE. When the SAE informed the Libraries that they remain unwilling to accept any access to the Digital Library other than through the DRM plugin, the Libraries reluctantly chose this alternative path.

We welcome and encourage your feedback

We are interested in your views about this situation, particularly given its manifestation of some of the complex issues currently facing publishers, academic authors, users of digital content, and the libraries that serve them. Please address comments or questions to any of the following members of the MIT Libraries staff:

Anna Gold, Head, Engineering & Science Libraries: annagold@mit.edu / x3 7741
Tracy Gabridge, Associate Head, Barker Engineering Library: tag@mit.edu / x3 8971
Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant, efinnie@mit.edu / x38483

Please note: a correction was made to this story 3/22/07 to clarify the ownership of the DRM plug-in, based on information received from Adobe.

Benjamin Mako Hill, a graduate student in the Media Lab’s Computing Culture group, coordinated the February 15th “Student Day of Action for Open Access” at MIT. Following the successful “Overprice Tags” event, Hill spoke with Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant in the MIT Libraries, about how he came to be involved in the open access (OA) movement, and why it matters to him as a student, author, programmer, and reader.

Hill’s involvement in open access issues is not new. He began writing free software when he was 12, was inspired as an eighth-grader by Richard Stallman’s writings about free software, and became involved in open access to scholarly research through two events in the past year: attendance at the Access to Knowledge conference last year at Yale Law School, and his related research project for a class at the Kennedy School at Harvard, which was comparative analysis of the Access to Essential Medicines movement and OA. In carrying out this project, Hill says he “learned a huge amount about OA and [I] have been a big fan since.” Libraries: How is your thinking about free software and open access to research related? Hill: I think that cultural works, knowledge, and information should be free. Free software has very good definitions of what is free. … The OA movement makes a series of strong normative claims about what should be free and backs these up with compelling argument and evidence. That’s the kind of movement that I think is likely to be successful and it’s the kind of movement that I want to be a part of. Libraries: You are an author of articles as well as code; how do your views about open access relate to your own works — where you choose to publish, how they are made available?

Hill: I have never written code that I have sold. That means that I’ve not been able to make as much money writing code as I might have — but I think that’s OK … Being an author is a little trickier. I write both academic papers and technical books regularly which, economically, are very different beasts. I’ve only started to publish academically so I’m still thinking about the range of possibilities but I’m looking forward to supporting OA in any way that I can; I want any papers I produce to be distributed openly. In terms of technical books, I’ve worked hard and been lucky there as well. My last book was the best selling book on Linux for most of last year and is under a Creative Commons “Attribution-Share Alike” license. It’s possible that I didn’t make as much money off the book as I might of. Then again, I think much of the book’s success was due to the fact that it was open.

Libraries: In your paper “How free became open and everything else under the sun,” you argue that “Free Software exists as a politically agnostic field of practice” and that its philosophy can be translated “into the terms of radically different, even oppositional, social and political movements.” Do you think this true of the open access movement in scholarly publishing, too?

Hill: Sure. OA benefits a variety of different people. MIT administrators might support OA for purely financial reasons. I support it because that I think that it is wrong to deprive people of a good that could be had by everyone, everywhere, for the same cost that it is had by anyone. Those are very different perspectives but I’m happy that OA is defined in such a way that we can work together toward an overlapping goal.

Libraries: Is there a common misconception you find related to the open access movement that you would like to dispel?

Hill: I think that the term open access is unfortunate because it makes people think that the movement is much broader than it is. … In fact, OA is focused on a limited area and has answers to all of the hard questions already. … [T]here are compelling OA journals offering an example of how we can do it and what exactly it will take.

Libraries: Why should students become involved in this movement?

Hill: For undergrads, it’s your tuition that pays [for high-priced journals and a system that suffers from barriers to access]. More important though, it’s unfair. We should fix this for ourselves because that’s going to be more convenient but we also have an ethical obligation to fix this so that people who can’t go to MIT, and that’s most people, can access these resources where possible. Once we’ve edited a journal, it doesn’t cost anything to let everyone in the world view it. Why doesn’t this happen? When other people are [choosing to set up barriers to] their [own] work, that’s one thing. But [publishers are] also doing it with *our* work and they are not giving us a choice to act otherwise.

Libraries: Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts about open access to research, and your motivations for leading the “Student Day of Action for Open Access.” We will be eager to see what other events and activities MIT Free Culture takes on.