Harvard Library Releases an Individual Open-Access License for Non-Faculty Scholars
From Harvard University Library Office of Scholarly Communication:
The Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication is pleased to announce the launch of a new open-access license for all Harvard authors of scholarly articles.
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The new Individual Open-Access License (IOAL) gives Harvard’s non-faculty researchers the same benefits that the faculty policies give faculty. Under the voluntary IOAL, non-faculty authors grant to Harvard the same non-exclusive rights that faculty grant to Harvard under the school-level policies, and Harvard grants the same non-exclusive rights back to the authors. As a result, authors signing the IOAL will have more rights to reuse their own work than they receive under standard or even progressive publishing contracts.
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The IOAL does not give Harvard “ownership” of these works. Authors retain ownership or copyright to keep or transfer as they wish. The IOAL gives Harvard no exclusive rights, just non-exclusive rights – for example to make covered works publicly available through DASH.
By design, the IOAL takes precedence over later publisher agreements, just like the faculty policies. Hence, authors who sign the IOAL before submitting a future work to a publisher will receive this bundle of rights without regard to the terms of their publishing contract, unless they choose to opt out of the license for that article. The IOAL does not apply retroactively.
Learn More, Read the Complete Post
Direct to FAQ entry on the IOAL
See Also: MIT Announces a New Open Access Policy For All MIT Authors (April 6, 2017)
Filed under: Academic Libraries, Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.