Post date: Oct 29, 2019

The 39 members of the Greater Western Library Alliance endorse the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts as a model to guide negotiations with scholarly publishers.

The MIT Framework affirms the overarching principle that control of scholarship and its dissemination should reside with scholars and their institutions, and aims to ensure that scholarly research outputs are openly and equitably available to the broadest possible audience. Institutions and scholars maintain the rights to share their work openly via institutional repositories, and publishers are paid for the services valued by authors and readers, such as curation and peer-review management.

“The MIT Framework respects and values the contributions of authors, researchers, peer reviewers, and editors who produce and publish scholarship, allows authors to retain rights to their work, while also recognizing the important role publishers bring to the process,” commented Joni Blake, GWLA Executive Director. “It provides libraries with guidance and flexibility to preserve and curate the important contributions to scientific discovery that are taking place at their institutions to maximize use and reuse.”

“The ideas in the framework are not new for MIT, which has been a leader in sharing its knowledge with the world,” says Chris Bourg, Director, MIT Libraries. “This is a clear articulation by the MIT faculty of what they want in scholarly communications — a scholar-led, open, and equitable environment that promises to advance knowledge and its applications. It is also a model that we think will be appealing for a diverse range of scholarly institutions, from private research-intensive universities like MIT to small liberal arts colleges and large public universities.”

The six core principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts are:

1. No author will be required to waive any institutional or funder open access policy to publish in any of the publisher’s journals.

2. No author will be required to relinquish copyright, but instead will be provided with options that enable publication while also providing authors with generous reuse rights.

3. Publishers will directly deposit scholarly articles in institutional repositories immediately upon publication or will provide tools/mechanisms that facilitate immediate deposit.

4. Publishers will provide computational access to subscribed content as a standard part of all contracts, with no restrictions on non-consumptive, computational analysis of the corpus of subscribed content.

5. Publishers will ensure the long-term digital preservation and accessibility of their content through participation in trusted digital archives.

6. Institutions will pay a fair and sustainable price to publishers for value-added services, based on transparent and cost-based pricing models.

A full list of endorsing institutions: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/

GWLA Endorses MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts (PDF, 69 kb ; link opens in new tab)