Chicago, January 21, 2020 – The Executive Board of the NERL Consortium (The Board) approved support for the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts. At the forefront of this framework is the belief that authors should retain copyright with generous reuse rights and the ability to immediately place scholarly articles in institutional repositories.
The NERL Board strongly supports the open and equitable dissemination of scholarly research output and believes that this framework is a pivotal step in this direction.
The six (6) key principles in the framework are:
- No author will be required to waive any institutional or funder open access policy to publish in any of the publisher’s journals.
- 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.
- Publishers will directly deposit scholarly articles in institutional repositories immediately upon publication or will provide tools/mechanisms that facilitate immediate deposit.
- 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.
- Publishers will ensure the long-term digital preservation and accessibility of their content through participation in trusted digital archives.
- Institutions will pay a fair and sustainable price to publishers for value-added services, based on transparent and cost-based pricing models.
Winston Tabb, Chair of the NERL Board and Dean of the Johns Hopkins University Libraries, comments, “NERL is happy to support MIT’s principled and forward-looking stand, which is driven by our libraries’ commitment to make research widely available for the benefit of mankind.”
Chris Bourg, Director of the MIT Libraries, says, “We are thankful for the support of the NERL Board, which recognizes that scholarship is most beneficial to humanity when it is freely and immediately available to the entire world. We’re proud to stand together with them as we both work toward creating equitable environments for scholarship and discovery.”
About the NERL Consortium
The NERL Consortium consists of a core group of 30 the most research intensive institutions in North America. It is a national leader in negotiated licensing whose mission is to serve as an advocate for the collective power and influence of libraries and their parent institutions. NERL is based at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) in Chicago.
About MIT Libraries
The MIT Libraries advance knowledge at MIT and beyond by providing a trusted foundation for the generation, dissemination, use, creative engagement with, and preservation of information. The Libraries envision a world where enduring, abundant, equitable, and meaningful access to knowledge serves to empower and inspire humanity.