MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts yields new open-access model

The MIT Libraries has negotiated an innovative open-access agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) that allows MIT authors to make ACM articles freely available at no cost to them. It is the libraries’ first publisher contract completed under the principles for open scholarship in the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts, released in October 2019, and the agreement aligns with all elements in the framework.

The libraries negotiations team developed the agreement in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California, Carnegie Mellon University, and Iowa State University, who each signed a three-year contract with ACM for an open-access pilot.  

“This is a great example of scholarly societies and research libraries working together on an equitable and sustainable model that supports open science and the important work of societies,” says Chris Bourg, director of MIT Libraries.  

This first agreement under the MIT framework meets its goals, including protecting scholars’ and their communities’ control over their own intellectual output. The libraries have been using the framework as a foundation for negotiations with publishers since the fall, when it was released with more than 100 libraries and consortia in North America endorsing it. 

Under the ACM contract, MIT faculty and students will continue to receive unrestricted access to articles in the ACM Digital Library. In addition, as of Jan. 1, research articles in ACM’s journals and conference proceedings with corresponding authors from MIT will be made open access at the time of publication. For these articles, authors will not be charged open-access publication fees, authors will have the option to retain copyright, and articles will be published under a license permitting open sharing, with a default to a Creative Commons Attribution license.

In addition, ACM will automatically deposit the manuscripts of all MIT co-authored articles into MIT’s institutional repository, DSpace. The agreement also includes rights for computational (text or data mining) access to the ACM Digital Library.

The agreement is the result of an unusual collaboration among multiple libraries and a scholarly society, yielding a new open-access business model that ACM is now using around the world. 

“This collaboration demonstrates the power and potential of libraries and scholarly societies as partners in shaping the future of scholarly communication in productive ways,” says Ellen Finnie, head of Scholarly Communications and Collections Strategy and convener of the MIT Libraries’ negotiations team. “We will be able to learn from this agreement as we continue to explore sustainable ways to realize the potential of the digital age for openly sharing the results of research.” 

MIT authors who are corresponding authors of ACM articles and who would like to make the articles freely available at no cost to them can find more information on the MIT Libraries’ page for open access publishing support (under Association for Computing Machinery). 

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