Faculty and Researchers
What can faculty and researchers do?
Managing your copyrights: retaining rights to archive and reuse
See also: Faculty Perspectives and Copyright information for faculty.
Why is it important to retain rights?
Some publishers create significant barriers for authors who want to reuse their work, or allow others to use it. Negotiating changes to these standard agreements can help authors avoid unfortunate barriers to such reuse and sharing.
Many authors believe they already have the rights to reuse and share their work as they need to, but there are some common misperceptions about author rights.
Retaining some rights to archive and reuse your work: Tools & information
- MIT Copyright Amendment Form Developed at MIT, this amendment is a tool authors can use to retain rights when assigning copyright to a publisher so that authors will be able to use their publications in their academic work and meet requests of their funding agencies.
- Using a publisher agreement amendment: for MIT authors funded by NIH
- Publisher Copyright Policies & Self-Archiving – Determine whether you can post articles to your own web site, to MIT’s research repository (Dspace), or to a discipline-based repository. Check publisher compliance with research funder policies.
- Retaining Rights & Increasing the Impact of Your Research: One-page summary of key issues and tools for MIT authors; this content is also summarized in a 3-part online tutorial “Scholarly Publication and Copyright.”
- More on managing your copyrights – Sample copyright transfer agreements, alternative copyright transfer agreement amendment forms, and more.
Increasing your research impact: posting your article where it can be accessed without barriers
Open access articles offer greater impact than those gated behind subscription barriers. There are several options for making your research more widely available:
- Publish in an open access journal.
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- The Directory of Open Access Journals offers a list of free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals in a broad array of disciplines. Select “For authors” to see the various open access options available.
- Choose an open access option in a traditional journal that has become “hybrid,” giving the author the option to pay for an individual article to be open access.
- Include your work in MIT’s faculty research repository: Dspace@MIT.
- Include your work in one of the Discipline-based repositories, e.g.:
Participating in the evolution of scholarly publishing
Exert Your Influence through Publishing Decisions
- Consider publishing in a more cost-effective journal, which you can find by searching in a database that allows you to check the relative cost and value of a journal as assessed by a formula developed by an Economist at the University of California Santa Barbara, Ted Bergstrom.
- Consider publishing in an open access journal. You can check a range of impact factors to help evaluate journals.
- Consider publishing in an alternative journal; such journals are lower cost and offer publishing models that encourage broad distribution and reuse of content.
- Consider starting an alternative or open access journal:
- Open Access Journal Business Guides from the Budapest Initiative.
- Chemistry Central and BioMed Central offer a service to researchers to start independent, open access journals.
- An MIT-based example: Journal of machine learning research, whose Editor in Chief and Founder is Leslie Kaelbling, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT.
- Read what the Faculty Committee on the Library System said about publishing decisions in 2004, including ideas about approaches you can take as a journal editor or member of a society.
For more information on what faculty and researchers can do, see the Association of Research Libraries’ Create Change site.