Mar 21

PLOS announces newest joiners to the CRL/NERL Agreement

By Erin Haddad-Null Press Release

SAN FRANCISCO – The Public Library of Science (PLOS) welcomes several new participants to its ongoing three-year consortial agreement with Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and the Northeast Research Libraries (NERL) program. Joining twenty fellow member institutions who signed on during the first year, newly participating institutions for the second year include Duke University, Macalester College, University of Arizona, University of Denver, University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Washington.

This agreement provides researchers with unlimited publishing privileges in PLOS journals without incurring fees. All PLOS journals are underpinned by institutional business models that move beyond article processing charges (APC) to ensure more equitable and regionally appropriate ways to support Open Access publishing. PLOS’ institutional models are Community Action Publishing (CAP)[1], Flat Fees [2], and the Global Equity model [3]

“These additions to our NERL/CRL agreement represent more momentum in our mission to advance Open Science,” said Sara Rouhi, Director of Strategic Partnerships for PLOS. “These institutions share our commitment to building business models that will move researchers and journals toward a more equitable and barrier free form of publishing.”

“This agreement will allow all researchers at Duke to publish their work in any PLOS journal without having to worry about article processing charges,” said Elena Feinstein, Head of Collection Strategy & Development, Duke University Libraries. “It also aligns with Duke University’s commitments to equity and knowledge in the service of society.”

“The CRL/NERL partnership with PLOS continues to support members’ desire for innovative models that make publishing and research more equitable and inclusive. This collaboration supports mutually beneficial progress toward fair and accessible publishing. We are thrilled to see the continued growth of this meaningful partnership,” said Lanette Garza, Director of NERL & CRL Licensing.

Alongside CRL/NERL members, a growing list of institutions including the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the University of California system, Jisc (including University College London, Imperial College London, University of Manchester), the Sachsen and TIB consortia’s in Germany, and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network among others have decided to support their researchers through publishing deals with PLOS.

The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) recently honored PLOS as the 2021 co-winner for Innovation in Publishing for its Community Action Publishing model.

[1] Participating journals include PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine and PLOS Sustainability and Transformation

[2] Participating journals include PLOS Digital Health, PLOS ONE, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Pathogens, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLOS Genetics

[3] Participating journals include PLOS Climate, PLOS Water, PLOS Global Public Health

Mar 16

CRL Hires Lanette Garza as NERL Program Manager

By oceanadmin Press Release

The Center for Research Libraries is pleased to announce the appointment of Lanette Garza as the NERL Program Manager. Garza comes to this new position at an important moment in NERL’s history as the NERL community has renewed energy and purpose, having issued its “Demands a Better Deal” statement in March 2021 and having recently concluded innovative, successful negotiations that will make research more openly available.

Garza was appointed through a robust community-engaged process led by a search committee consisting of Erin Haddad-Null (CRL), Jeff Kosokoff (outside consultant, chair), Jessica Morales (Notre Dame), Yelitza Mendoza (CRL), and Maggie Saponaro (U. Maryland). Garza brings to the role deep experience working with designing and maintaining workflows for the acquisition, licensing, and maintenance of all aspects of the licensed resource life cycle. She has worked in multiple library environments. Previously, Garza spent eight years working at Trinity University where noted accomplishments included developing the library’s first data center dashboard to highlight resource and library use, creating a licensing checklist to ensure fair and equitable licensing terms, establishing an E-Resources Playbook for routine assessment, and co-authoring an ALA and NEH grant to facilitate discussions and events about Latino American history.

Garza is passionate about foregrounding equity in her work and the work of research libraries, and the new energy and perspectives she provides will benefit NERL. “Lanette brings an exciting set of skills and experience to this important role,” said Greg Eow, President of CRL. “I was particularly impressed with how Lanette brought a passion for data analytics and assessment together with a passion for making the scholarly publishing more diverse and equitable.” Sarah Forzetting, Chair of the NERL Program Council Executive Committee and Associate Director, Acquisitions & Collections Services at Stanford Libraries, commends the members of the search committee and the NERL community for their contributions to the successful search. According to Forzetting, “Program Council is energized by Garza’s appointment, and we look forward to leaning on her expertise in building solid operational structures for the creative and impactful work NERL has planned.”

Garza began her appointment on February 28 and will be based in Texas.

Mar 03

NERL and Cambridge University Press Strike Open Access Agreement

By NERL Press Release

The NERL consortium has entered into an agreement with Cambridge University Press to support open access publishing in Cambridge journals.

From January 1^st 2022, corresponding authors affiliated with participating NERL institutions can publish an unlimited number of research articles open access in Cambridge hybrid and gold journals at no additional cost. For participants this agreement also expands the number of journals licensed or otherwise sustains access to the complete package of journals offered by the publisher.

The NERL Program Council project team, led by Brigitte Weinsteiger, Gershwind & Bennett Family Associate Vice Provost for Collections & Scholarly Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, worked closely with Cambridge to establish the terms of the partnership, and interrogate the publisher’s transformative agreement model against NERL’s core values. The result is a financially sustainable agreement for both parties that furthers a number of shared priorities around the transition to a more equitable and open research landscape.

Research from NERL members accounts for over 25% of Cambridge’s US originated output, and this agreement ensures a new and significant portion of research in Cambridge journals can now be published open access.

Weinsteiger said, “I am delighted that NERL and Cambridge could arrive at a mutually beneficial agreement that not only expands global access to the important research coming out of NERL institutions, but also secures the necessary funding for Cambridge’s publishing while remaining financially sustainable for all parties.”

Greg Eow, President of the Center for Research Libraries, the administrative host of NERL, added: “This agreement marks an important moment for NERL. By signing its first Read and Publish Open Access agreement, NERL further demonstrates its commitment to partner with publishers to foster a healthy academic publishing environment for the good of all.”

Kellie O’Rourke, Head of Library Sales, Americas for Cambridge, said: “We have a long history of collaboration with NERL, and are delighted to bring this influential group of institutions into a transformative agreement. This partnership has huge potential to advance us toward our goal of becoming a majority open access journals publisher by 2025, and demonstrates our ongoing commitment to working with organizations of all types and sizes to secure sustainable open futures for the research we publish.”

Participating Institutions (correct as of 1^st March 2022)

Amherst College		North Carolina State University
Boston College		Northeastern University
Brandeis University		Princeton University
Brown University		Providence College
Central Connecticut State University		Stanford University
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories		SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
College of the Holy Cross		Syracuse University
Columbia University		University of Delaware
Cornell University		University of Georgia
Dartmouth University		University of Kentucky
Duke University		University of Maryland – College Park
Emory University		University of Massachusetts – Amherst
George Washington University		University of New Hampshire
Georgetown University		University of Notre Dame
Georgia Institute of Technology		University of Pennsylvania
Georgia State University		University of Pittsburgh
Johns Hopkins University		University of Virginia
Mount Holyoke College		Wesleyan University
New York University		Yale University

About NERL: A national leader in negotiated licensing, NERL maximizes effective and sustainable access to content for its member institutions. By building and supporting alliances between higher education and the information industry, NERL serves as an advocate for the collective power and influence of academic libraries and their parent . https://nerl.org/

The NERL and Cambridge project was chaired by Brigitte Weinsteiger of the University of Pennsylvania with contributions by Sarah Forzetting of Stanford University, Jessica Morales of the University of Notre Dame, Ken Peterson formerly of Dartmouth University, Lindsay Cronk of the University of Rochester, Jesse Koennecke of Cornell University, and Scott Warren of Syracuse University.

About Cambridge University Press: Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge and is the academic publishing group of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. It publishes academic books and journals and serves customers in higher education through the provision of world-leading research and education products and services. https://www.cambridge.org/

Feb 03

NERL and Elsevier continue agreement and develop open access pilot

By Erin Haddad-Null Uncategorized

February 3, 2022 – NERL, a consortium representing some of America’s leading research institutions, and Elsevier, a global leader in research publishing and information analytics, have established a new three-year agreement. The deal provides 13 of the NERL member institutions with ScienceDirect access and pilots retroactive open access (OA) for participating institutions’ authors. In 2021, a project team of NERL and Elsevier representatives established the agreement terms to ensure continued access to Elsevier’s journals and support the NERL core values of transparency, sustainability, equity, reproducibility, and flexibility.

This mutually sustainable agreement includes numerous NERL Preferred Deal Elements. The retroactive OA pilot program is the first of its kind. Each year of the agreement will open five years of content by researchers based at NERL institutions—a total of 15 years constituting tens of thousands of articles authored by leading researchers. The agreement advances NERL’s values-based licensing agenda and Elsevier’s commitment to OA. The participating institutions—including Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Rochester, the University of Miami and others—will all have content included as a part of the pilot.

Lindsay Cronk, project Co-chair and University of Rochester Assistant Dean of Scholarly Resources & Curation, said: “The future of scholarly communication depends on agreements that don’t reinforce the inertia of the past or create new inequities. We have succeeded in this agreement by arriving at an entirely new model that provides more access for all who seek knowledge.”

Greg Eow, President of the Center for Research Libraries, the administrative host of NERL, added: “We are proud that NERL continues to be a leader in the movement towards open access, and we look to build on this agreement to find even more robust ways to democratize access to scholarship going forward.”

Elsevier works in partnership with customers to understand their objectives and collaborate with them to achieve these while preserving the quality, integrity, and sustainability of peer-review scholarly communications. The agreement supports NERL’s goals by enabling researchers to stay up to date with the latest science, technology, and health findings worldwide via ScienceDirect, while opening ScienceDirect content authored by NERL researchers.

”We are delighted to support NERL’s world-class researchers to access and publish high-quality, trusted research,” says James Tonna, Elsevier’s Vice President forNorth America Academic and Government. “Working collaboratively with NERL, we hope to play a small part in helping their researchers advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society.”

—

About NERL

A national leader in negotiated licensing, NERL maximizes effective and sustainable access to content for its member institutions. By building and supporting alliances between higher education and the information industry, NERL serves as an advocate for the collective power and influence of academic libraries and their parent institutions.

The NERL and Elsevier project was co-chaired by Jessica Morales of Notre Dame and Lindsay Cronk of the University of Rochester, with key contributors that included Ken Peterson formerly of Dartmouth University, Maridath Wilson of Boston University, Michael Fernandez of Yale University, Katie Brady of the University of Pennsylvania, and Terrie Wheeler of Cornell University.

About Elsevier
As a global leader in information and analytics, Elsevier helps researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. We do this by facilitating insights and critical decision-making for customers across the global research and health ecosystems.

In everything we publish, we uphold the highest standards of quality and integrity. We bring that same rigor to our information analytics solutions for researchers, health professionals, institutions and funders.

Elsevier employs 8,100 people worldwide. We have supported the work of our research and health partners for more than 140 years. Growing from our roots in publishing, we offer knowledge and valuable analytics that help our users make breakthroughs and drive societal progress. Digital solutions such as ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, ClinicalKey and Sherpath support strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support, and health education. Researchers and healthcare professionals rely on our 2,500+ digitized journals, including The Lancet and Cell; our 40,000 eBook titles; and our iconic reference works, such as Gray’s Anatomy. With the Elsevier Foundation and our external Inclusion & Diversity Advisory Board, we work in partnership with diverse stakeholders to advance inclusion and diversity in science, research and healthcare in developing countries and around the world.

Elsevier is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. www.elsevier.com

Aug 31

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

By Christine Stamison Uncategorized

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.

Jun 25

NorthEast Research Libraries and Center for Research Libraries join growing movement to support Directory of Open Access Journals in the USA

By Christine Stamison Uncategorized

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.

May 26

NERL Develops Preferred Deal Elements for License Negotiations

By Christine Stamison Uncategorized

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.

Category	Preferred Deal Element	NERL Core Value
Fees	Discounts to match market standards and real cost	Equity
	Rational pricing year to year, literal rather than “rebalanced”	Sustainability, Transparency, Flexibility
	Total spend considerations	Sustainability
	Simpler cost model	Transparency
Term	3 Year Max– the longer the term, the deeper the discount	Sustainability
	No confidentiality or non-disclosure clause	Flexibility, Transparency
	Data Privacy	Transparency
	Accessiblity (current standard)	Equity
	Commitment to DEI	Equity
Opt-In	Open to any NERL Core member	Sustainability
Open Access:	Green: Eliminates NERL Author Embargo Period; Immediate Deposit in Disciplinary Repositories, Institutional Repositories, and Personal Websites	Sustainability, Equity
	Flip: Flip journals to open where 60%+ authors are NERL Authors	Sustainability, Equity
	Gold: Full Off-Setting or publisher-tracked discount	Sustainability, Equity
	Perpetual Access = Open Access Backfile: Flip all backfile content with moving wall to Open Access	Sustainability, Flexibility, Equity
Authorized Uses	Whole book ILL	Sustainability
	Text and data-mining	Reproducibility
	Unrestricted ILL	Sustainability
Author Rights	First Public Right rather than all copyright	Sustainability
Author Rights	Eliminate APC charges	Sustainability, Flexibility
Content	No loss of content	Transparency

Mar 03

NERL Issues a Statement Demanding a Better Deal

By Christine Stamison Uncategorized

Chicago, March 3, 2021

The NERL Consortium issued a statement, “NERL Demands a Better Deal,” articulating the values NERL will adopt in negotiating agreements with publishers. The statement, which originated in the NERL Program Council and which has generated broad support across the NERL community, outlines the following core values in service to an open, equitable, and healthy academic publishing ecosystem:

Transparency: NERL commits to transparency of the negotiating process and will share details of discussions, outcomes, and cost whenever possible to demonstrate leadership for academic libraries. We commit to demanding transparency from our vendor partners and will prioritize vendor partners who honor this commitment.
Sustainability: NERL negotiates for terms that ensure greater sustainability, pursuing opportunities to support collective infrastructure and collective ownership. We prioritize agreements that move past historical pricing models and precedent. We encourage smarter, better, and often smaller deals that do not increase cost with unrequested content while providing clear and transparent pricing models.
Equity: NERL negotiates for terms that support the rights of all researchers to participate in the scholarly communications ecosystem as knowledge creators; to do so requires partnership between libraries and publishers to eliminate barriers. We work to ensure that costs to researchers and institutions are aligned with the costs of publishing, so everyone has access to open access publishing.
Reproducibility: NERL agreements uphold Author’s Rights, ensuring no forced copyright transfer from author to publisher, computational rights for researchers to use articles in text mining or other practices, and the right to deposit articles in institutional repositories.
Flexibility: We will encourage and prioritize NERL Agreements that incentivize emerging, efficient, and sustainable business models. We seek meaningful and creative alternatives that support the dissemination and preservation of the scholarly record.

The full statement can be read here.

About the NERL Consortium

Jan 21

The NERL Executive Board Approves Support for the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts

By Christine Stamison Uncategorized

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.

Oct 23

MIT Announces Framework to Guide Negotiations with Publishers

By Christine Stamison Uncategorized

The MIT Libraries, together with the MIT Committee on the Library System and the Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research, announced that it has developed a principle-based framework to guide negotiations with scholarly publishers. The framework emerges directly from the core principles for open science and open scholarship articulated in the recommendations of the Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research, which released its final report to the MIT community on Oct. 17.

http://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-announces-framework-guide-negotiations-publishers-1023