Retaining rights
What it means to retain rights
- 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.”
- MIT authors are often most interested in retaining rights to:
- Reuse their work in teaching, future publications, and in scholarly and professional activities.
- Post their work on the web (self-archiving); e.g., in DSpace@MIT, MIT’s research repository, in a discipline archive (such as PubMed Central or arXiv), or on a web page.
- Openly available articles have been shown to be more heavily cited by more diverse sources. But publishers can create significant barriers for authors who want to reuse or share their work, and/or for access to that work by others.
- MIT faculty unanimously adopted a policy in March 2009 that allows authors to hold onto rights make their papers openly available without having to negotiate individually with publishers. Faculty are covered by default. Any other MIT student, researcher, or staff member can opt into MIT’s OA policy. Through this policy, authors give MIT nonexclusive permission to make their scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. The policy exists prior to any publisher copyright agreement, which is what makes it hold force.
- Many research funders request or require that articles and data created with their funds be made available openly, and they want authors to retain sufficient rights to do so. See our information and resources on US federal funder public access policies. Search funder policies in JISC’s Open policy finder database. Find other institutions with open access policies or mandates.
Which publishers are likely to be flexible about these rights?
- Publisher policies and agreements vary considerably.
- The Open policy finder database from JISC offers a convenient summary of many publisher copyright policies & self-archiving.
- Publisher policies and agreements are often 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.
How to retain rights
- MIT’s OA policy is a rights retention tool. If you are covered by it, and if your publisher doesn’t require a waiver of the policy, you can re all set.
- If you’re not covered by an OA policy, one 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@MIT; and to deposit them into any discipline-based research repository (including PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine’s database for NIH-funded manuscripts). Using an amendment is a way to negotiate changes to standard publisher agreements.
- We can look at your author agreement for journal, conference, or book publishing, and help you determine what rights you hold onto & what rights you may want to ask for. Ask Scholarly Communications