New template institutional archiving agreement launched

AcademicPress Release

A template for agreements between academic publishers and universities for the deposit of metadata relating to journal articles has been launched today by the Publishers Association following input from members of the Publishers Association’s Academic, Professional and Learning Publishers Council. 

The template is designed to provide those negotiating such agreements with a framework for discussions between publishers and staff in the university and library sectors. It relates to the deposit of academic research into institutional archives and is designed to help address common workflow issues. It is available to all those engaged in academic publishing, irrespective of whether or not they are a member of the Publishers Association. 

The template facilitates practical steps for institutions and publishers by including provisions relating to:   

  • The systematic provision of metadata by publishers to universities relating to the journal articles of their researchers
  • Facilitating the deposit in institutional repositories of the Accepted Manuscript versions of articles in compliance with open access policies 
  • The granting of a licence by publishers to institutions to store and make available the Accepted Manuscript versions    
  • Removing the onus on researchers to deposit their articles by putting in place processes between publishers and institutions 
  • Embargo periods      
  • Use of an appropriate Creative Commons (CC) licence  

Peter Phillips, Vice President of the Publishers Association, said: “We are pleased that publishers support this agreement as a template for reducing the complexities of Green open access. We hope it will also be useful to funders and other organisations who are reviewing their Green open access policies and how to implement them.” 

Emma House, Deputy Chief Executive of the Publishers Association, added: “Publishers recognise that the ‘policy stack’ places a large burden on librarians in terms of resources and staff time in reconciling all of the various Green open access policies among institutions, funders and publishers. 

“This template agreement can be used by publishers as a helpful starting point for individual negotiations with academic libraries. We hope both academic publishers, libraries and universities will find it both useful and constructive.  

“It is important to note that this is not a publisher agreed standard for implementation – it is intended as a starting point for the parties involved to amend and develop agreements from, if they would find that helpful. We know that some publishers are already planning to use the IAA and we hope that more continue to do so in the months and years ahead.” 

 Download the Institutional Archiving Agreement