MIT has been a leader in supporting ways in which educators can retain rights to their academic writings and open up those creations to the world. MIT Libraries has produced a series of videocasts entitled Scholarly Publication and Copyright: Retaining Rights & Increasing the Impact of Research.

Part 1 focuses on how copyright law intersects with the publication process.

Part 2 reviews why academic writers might want to retain rights when publishing, and how they can do so.

Part 3 provides information on increasing the impact of research by making it available through open access channels.

If faculty are able to retain rights, the tutorial explains how Creative Commons can be a useful tool to share scholarly work more widely. Creative Commons’ goals align well with the mission of most academic authors — share and reuse. MIT Scholarly Publishing Consultant Ellen Duranceau says the idea underpinning the tutorial is this: “we need to maximize the potential of research to be shared in the digital age by finding publishing models that realize the potential of the Internet to publish quickly, broadly and inexpensively.”