What’s the IR doing in our Taylor & Francis Content License? | OAnarchy

"Fundamentally, content licenses between KU Libraries and a publisher are about providing access to licensed content to KU students, faculty, and staff. Fine. This IR section of the T&F content license isn’t about that; it’s about them determining how we can support our institutional authors who publish in T&F journals. Since our IR is an institutional service for our authors, I don’t see why a publisher should have any voice in determining how we provide that service so long as we’re operating within the law. If KU didn’t have an open access policy then the impact would be negligible in the short term (notwithstanding the above critiques of 13.2.3, 13.2.4, and 13.3). I say in the short term because it might limit the ability of an institutional library to support a future OA policy should their faculty ever adopt and seek to implement one. Given the sustained growth of OA policies, that seems likely if this section becomes standard. This section seems directly intended to undermine Harvard-style (rights retention) institutional open access policies and tie institutions to author agreements (that the institution doesn’t sign) by codifying rights granted in those agreements in an institutional agreement. Content licenses arguably have nothing to do with how we support our faculty authors, so this has no place in a content license, IMO. Of course, that’s being challenged in the UC read and publish proposal to Elsevier, and there are isolated incidents of elite institutional libraries getting better deals for their faculty authors through these agreements. I wouldn’t presume to limit that kind of experimentation. However, anecdotally, I’ve heard of several attempts to add language to content agreements that would advance author rights, by requiring the publisher to provide accepted manuscripts for all institutionally-authored articles published in their journals, for example, which were categorically rejected by the publisher representatives. Why then should we not categorically reject their attempts to play the other side of that card, even if they weren’t problematic as I’ve described? If the only institutions who are able to successfully achieve better deals for their authors via content agreements are elite, where does that leave the rest of us? For our part, we have struck this whole IR section from our draft agreement and are waiting on a T&F reaction...."