NERL and CRL sign agreement to support Direct to Open from the MIT Press

It has become easier for NERL and CRL member libraries to make a strategic choice and switch from buying scholarly books from the MIT Press once for a single collection to funding them once, open access, for the world while enjoying exclusive benefits including backlist access and trade collection discounts

August 30, 2021 (Cambridge, MA)—Today, the MIT Press, the NorthEast Research Libraries (NERL), and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) announced that NERL will handle the central licensing and invoicing for MIT Press’ Direct to Open (D2O) for NERL and CRL member libraries. Through this three-year agreement, NERL and CRL join a growing community of libraries seeking to support innovative, sustainable frameworks for open access monographs through collective action. 

Developed over two years with the generous support of the Arcadia Fund, D2O moves professional and scholarly books from a solely market-based, purchase model to a collaborative, library-supported open access model. Through the participation of libraries and consortia like NERL and CRL, D2O will enable scores of titles each year to become openly accessible without BPCs and with real local benefits for supporting libraries. Rather than opening access to books on a per title basis, D2O will allow the Press to open its complete list of scholarly books published in 2022.

NERL and CRL libraries that commit to support D2O collections—libraries may support the entire collection or select between the Humanities and Social Sciences or the STEAM (STEM plus Art & Design) collection—before September 30, 2021 will also receive the benefit of access to the corresponding backfile for that collection. The complete collection backfile offers access to over 2,300 scholarly titles on the MIT Press Direct platform spanning the publishing history of the Press. D2O participating libraries also receive special discounting on the MIT Press’s trade books collection on the MIT Press Direct platform. If D2O does not reach the success threshold for 2022, participating libraries are assured term access to the archive collection without paying the fee.

Christine Stamison, director of NERL, says “The D2O initiative seeks to make books open access in a manner that aligns with NERL’s values of transparency, sustainability, equity, reproducibility, and flexibility. We are delighted to support D2O access for NERL and CRL institutions through NERL’s efficient services.”

“MIT Press’ D2O model speaks to the heart of our work at CRL in finding new ways research libraries and mission-driven academic publishers can partner together to create an open knowledge ecosystem that aligns with our values,” notes Greg Eow, president of CRL and board member of the MIT Press Management Board. “These kinds of radical collaborations redefine how the community can work together to advance the creation and dissemination of knowledge for the good of all.” 

“We are thrilled to have NERL’s support in our mission to make scholarly monographs and edited collections available as widely and openly as possible,” says MIT Press director and publisher Amy Brand. “Their sponsorship will go a long way in helping to ensure the success of the D2O model and also get us several steps closer to being able to guarantee that any author, regardless of their ability to source funding, is able to publish their accepted monograph open access with the MIT Press.”

To learn more about Direct to Open, or to sign-up to become a participating library, visit direct.mit.edu/books/pages/direct-to-open or contact Emily Farrell, Library Partnerships & Sales Lead, the MIT Press.

About NERL  
The NERL Consortium consists of a core group of 30 of 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 CRL  
The Center for Research Libraries is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries collectively building, stewarding, and sharing a wealth of resource materials from all world regions to support inspired research and teaching. CRL’s deep and diverse collections are shaped by specialists at major U.S. and Canadian research universities, who work together to identify and preserve collections and content, to ensure its long-term integrity and accessibility to researchers worldwide. 

About the MIT Press
Established in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design. MIT Press publications are known for their intellectual daring, scholarly standards, interdisciplinary focus, and distinctive design. Direct to Open (D2O) harnesses collective action to support open access to excellent scholarship. When successful, the model will open access to all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections (~90 titles per year) from 2022 via recurring participation fees, provide participating libraries with term access to backlist/archives (~2,300 titles) which will otherwise remain gated, and cover partial direct costs for the publication of high-quality works that are also available for print purchase.

Press release

24 June 2021, Chicago – The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is delighted to be entering into a new agreement with the NorthEast Research Libraries Consortium (NERL) and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) in the United States. The arrangement will allow for greater support to DOAJ from the more than 300 members of the two consortia.

As a free and independent database, DOAJ indexes over 16,500 peer-reviewed open access journals from around the world. Under the new partnership both consortia will be able to offer support for DOAJ to their members at a substantial discount.

NERL and CRL include among their membership the majority of US universities that are designated in the Carnegie Classifications as doctoral universities with high or very high research activity.  Providing a smooth path for these institutions to provide support for DOAJ will help create a sustainable crowd-funding system, channeling funds directly to the activities of DOAJ.

NERL-affiliated institutions produce an estimated 10-12% of the most important and impactful scholarly research in the world. CRL’s community of more than 200 institutions in Canada and the United States with affiliates across the globe work together to advance solutions to sustain an open knowledge ecosystem. Today’s announcement enables the NERL and CRL consortia to stand alongside the many other consortia in the USA supporting sustainable open access publishing models through DOAJ.

“Open access is key to an equitable and sustainable future of the global research world and the advancement of knowledge. We are delighted to be partnering with NERL and CRL, this announcement comes at a critical moment in the USA, as collective support builds for open access and DOAJ,” said Lars Bjørnshauge, DOAJ Founder and Managing Director.

“DOAJ dovetails very well with NERL’s core values of Transparency, Sustainability, Equity, Reproducibility, and Flexibility. NERL is pleased to be partnering with both CRL and DOAJ to promote this endeavor,” commented Christine Stamison, Director of NERL.

“DOAJ’s infrastructure of enabling open knowledge sharing is consistent with CRL’s values of supporting the global community of researchers, librarians, archivists, publishers, and others to promote a resource environment where access to information is widely available for the benefit of all” stated James Simon, CRL’s Director of Collections and Partnerships.

An increased demand for vetted, high-quality online academic research, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, has highlighted the critical importance of support for essential library infrastructure services such as DOAJ.

About NERL

The NERL Consortium consists of a core group of 30 of 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 CRL

The Center for Research Libraries is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries collectively building, stewarding, and sharing a wealth of resource materials from all world regions to support inspired research and teaching. CRL’s deep and diverse collections are shaped by specialists at major U.S. and Canadian research universities, who work together to identify and preserve collections and content, to ensure its long-term integrity and accessibility to researchers worldwide.

About DOAJ

DOAJ is a community curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer reviewed journals.  DOAJ deploys more than one hundred carefully selected volunteers from among the community of library and other academic disciplines to assist in the curation of open access journals. This independent database contains over 15,000 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. DOAJ is financially supported worldwide by libraries, publishers and other like-minded organizations. DOAJ services (including the evaluation of journals) are free for all, and all data provided by DOAJ are harvestable via OAI/PMH and the API. See https://doaj.org/ for more information.

Since releasing NERL’s statement calling for a Better Deal on March 3rd, library colleagues from across the preeminent research institutions comprising NERL have worked to identify the opportunities to advocate for and manifest the five NERL values in consortial negotiations. Those values — Transparency, Sustainability, Equity, Reproducibility, and Flexibility — will be prioritized in our forthcoming deals. The Preferred Deal Elements (PDE) highlighted in the chart below map directly to NERL’s values and will scaffold and support the five major negotiations underway this year, including Elsevier, SpringerNature, Oxford University Press, The Economist/EIU, and CAS. Please note that the Preferred Deal Elements may differ slightly by publisher depending on the type of resources offered. We acknowledge that not all Preferred Deal Elements will be achieved in any single deal. However, we expect that some should be present in most.

We share these deal elements to support the work of other libraries and consortia who are grappling with questions like “What would equity look like in a license agreement?” and we are eager for feedback. We also share them to invite vendors and publishers to expand our collective understanding of what a deal can and should be, arriving together at solutions that serve our shared research communities. As we continue to own and demonstrate NERL’s commitment to transparency, we will share learning and outcomes from our co-creative processes with vendors and publishers. We want to work together– avoiding adversarial framings and entrenched philosophies to succeed together. We believe the Better Deal is possible.

If you are interested in discussing our Preferred Deal Elements, please contact NERL Director Christine Stamison. To download a copy of this blog, please click here.

We want to work with vendors and publishers to help develop and deliver subscription agreements that help us all achieve what is most important to all our missions– access to knowledge.

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:

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.

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.

New York-based Columbia University has accused a company established by late historian Ehsan Yarshater of falsely claiming to be the copyright owner of the Encyclopedia Iranica, a scholarly resource on Persian and Iranian history.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday, August 9 at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleged that Encyclopedia Iranica Foundation (EIF), a company set up in 1990, had also claimed to be the exclusive owner of trademark rights in the name of the work and a logo.

Read more: https://www.worldipreview.com/news/columbia-university-sues-over-ownership-of-encyclopedia-iranica-18465

Gregory Eow, currently Associate Director for Collections, MIT Libraries, will succeed Bernard Reilly as president of the Center for Research Libraries, effective August 12, 2019. The appointment was announced by Virginia Steel, Norman and Armena Powell University Librarian, University of California, Los Angeles and Chair of CRL’s Board of Directors. Speaking on behalf of the board Ms. Steel said, “We are delighted that Greg Eow will become the next president of CRL. He brings deep knowledge of research libraries and collections and many ideas about ways CRL can evolve in the coming years to maintain its centrality as a key part of the research library landscape.”

For more information go to: http://www.crl.edu/news/gregory-eow-named-new-crl-president

Rutgers University Libraries are delighted to welcome Jeff Carroll as assistant vice president for scholarly communication and collections, effective July 15, 2019.

In this role, Carroll will provide leadership, strategic direction, and support for the Libraries’ scholarly communication and collections infrastructure, ensuring that our resources and services advance the unique missions of Rutgers–Camden, Rutgers–Newark, Rutgers–New Brunswick, and Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences.

To read more please go to: https://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/news/libraries-welcome-jeff-carroll-assistant-vice-president-scholarly-communication-and-collections