STM Statement on Negotiating Rights for Institutional Repository Postings and Author Rights (March 2011)

"Recently some advocates for institutional repositories have noted that...there are efficiencies to be gained in negotiating at an institutional level with journal publishers. The stated purposes for such negotiations are two-fold: [1] to ensure that authors continue to have rights to use their works for scholarly and research purposes; and [2] to support institutional repositories as a means of disseminating research results. These advocates propose that content license negotiations between institutions and publishers be used for the acquisition of such usage rights for these purposes. STM publishers are of the view that content license negotiations deal appropriately with questions about the scope of content that will be accessible for each institutional subscriber as well as the scope of usage rights and relative costs for such accessibility and rights. These negotiations are often complex....We hold the view that conflating author rights issues and institutional content licenses serves only to add greater complexity and possible legal uncertainty to such licenses without adding meaningful benefits for authors. The publishing community has a strong track record of responsiveness to authors with respect to scholarly use and re-use and journal publishing agreements generally address, and have addressed for many years, issues about scholarly use and re-use by authors of their own work, including questions about compliance with research funder policies such as the NIH...."