When people talk about open access “mandates,” they usually mean a funder condition — a grant term from the NIH, NSF, or a cOAlition S member that requires grantees to make funded outputs freely available. MIT and Harvard took a structurally different route more than a decade before Plan S existed: their faculties voted, as an exercise of their own institutional authority, to grant the university a standing license in each faculty member’s future scholarly articles — before any publisher agreement is signed, and regardless of who funded the work. This guide explains how the MIT and Harvard policies actually work, mechanically, and why the distinction between an institution-granted rights-retention license and a funder-attached OA condition matters for anyone advising authors or negotiating publisher terms.
Institutional rights retention vs. funder-mandated open access
The two models solve the same underlying problem — a researcher signs away exclusive copyright to a publisher, which then blocks the researcher’s own institution or funder from freely distributing the work — but they intervene at different points and through different sources of authority.
- Funder-mandated OA (the model behind cOAlition S‘s Plan S, and the funder-side Rights Retention Strategy (RRS)) attaches a condition to grant funding. Authors funded by a Plan S signatory agree, as a term of accepting the grant, to retain sufficient rights to comply — typically by applying a CC BY licence to the author accepted manuscript regardless of what the publisher’s own policy says. The obligation exists because of who paid for the work.
- Institutional rights retention (the MIT/Harvard model) is a standing policy the university itself adopts, via faculty vote, that applies to a faculty member’s scholarly articles as a class — independent of funding source. The university secures a nonexclusive license before the author ever negotiates with a publisher, so there is nothing left for a later copyright transfer agreement to take away.
Because the institutional license attaches earlier and applies more broadly (any qualifying article, any funder or none), it functions as a backstop that funder mandates don’t reach on their own — and it predates Plan S by roughly a decade. The two are complementary, not competing: an MIT or Harvard author with NIH or Plan S funding still needs to separately satisfy that funder’s deposit and licensing requirements; the institutional policy doesn’t substitute for a funder mandate, and a funder mandate doesn’t substitute for the institutional one. For the general mechanics of green vs. gold routes and embargoes, see CASRAI’s Open Access Publishing guide and Self-Archiving for Green Open Access how-to.
Harvard: the first faculty rights-retention policy (2008)
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) adopted the first policy of this kind on February 12, 2008, by faculty vote. Under it, each FAS faculty member grants Harvard a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to make their scholarly articles available for non-profit, open-access distribution — with a waiver available to any author who requests one in writing. Other Harvard schools adopted equivalent policies over the following years, each using essentially the same license-and-waiver structure adapted to that school’s publication norms:
- Faculty of Arts and Sciences — February 12, 2008 (first adopter)
- Harvard Law School — May 1, 2008
- Harvard Kennedy School — March 10, 2009
- Graduate School of Education — June 1, 2009
- Harvard Business School — February 12, 2010 (scoped specifically to articles prepared for journal peer review, excluding cases and other non-peer-reviewed formats HBS faculty commonly produce)
- Divinity School — November 15, 2010
- Graduate School of Design — March 30, 2011
- T.H. Chan School of Public Health — November 26, 2012
- Harvard Medical School — June 18, 2014
Every school’s policy directs deposit of the covered article into DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), the university’s institutional repository, which preserves and openly distributes the license-covered version. Source: Harvard Library’s own policy summary (library.harvard.edu).
MIT: the Faculty Open Access Policy (2009) and its later extensions
MIT’s faculty adopted its Faculty Open Access Policy by unanimous vote on March 18, 2009. Mechanically it mirrors the Harvard model: each MIT faculty member grants MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to their scholarly articles, and this license attaches automatically — before any subsequent copyright transfer to a publisher — so a later publisher agreement cannot revoke rights MIT already holds. Authors deposit an electronic copy of their final version with the MIT Libraries on publication. As with Harvard, the policy includes an opt-out: the Provost’s Office will waive the policy for a specific article on written request from the author, no justification required. Source: MIT Libraries’ own policy page (libraries.mit.edu).
MIT has extended the rights-retention approach twice since the original faculty vote:
- 2017 opt-in extension — MIT authors who are not covered by the faculty vote itself (students, postdocs, staff, and other researchers) gained the option to apply the same open-access license to their own scholarly articles on an opt-in basis.
- MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts (2019–2020) — a set of negotiating principles the MIT Libraries developed for large-scale publisher agreements, built around protecting authors’ rights to their own scholarship (including the pre-existing OA policy license) and pursuing sustainable, equitable publishing terms rather than accepting standard “big deal” subscription/APC bundles as given. MIT has since signed agreements with several major publishers structured around this framework.
No later “MIT Framework for Open Scholarship” superseding the 2009 policy could be verified as of this writing — the 2009 Faculty Open Access Policy remains the operative institutional policy; the Framework for Publisher Contracts is a separate, complementary negotiating tool, not a replacement.
MIT vs. Harvard: the mechanism side by side
| Dimension | MIT Faculty Open Access Policy | Harvard (FAS and successor schools) |
|---|---|---|
| First adopted | March 18, 2009 (unanimous faculty vote) | February 12, 2008, FAS (first of any US university); other Harvard schools followed through 2014 |
| License granted | Nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise rights under copyright | Nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license for non-profit open distribution |
| Timing relative to publisher | Attaches automatically before any copyright transfer | Attaches automatically before any copyright transfer |
| Opt-out / waiver | Yes — written request to the Provost’s Office, no reason required | Yes — written request, no reason required (school-specific process) |
| Deposit repository | MIT Libraries’ open-access collection (DSpace@MIT) | DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) |
| Scope beyond original faculty vote | 2017 opt-in extension to students, postdocs, staff | Adopted school-by-school (FAS, Law, Kennedy, Education, Business, Divinity, Design, Public Health, Medicine), not a single university-wide vote |
Why this distinction matters for research administrators
If you support authors at an institution considering a similar policy, or advise faculty who publish at MIT, Harvard, or a peer institution with an equivalent policy, a few practical points follow directly from the mechanism:
- The license predates the publisher agreement. Because the university’s nonexclusive license attaches automatically at the moment an article is completed — not at the moment of publication — a copyright transfer agreement the author later signs with a publisher cannot legally undo it; the publisher can only ever receive the rights the author still holds after the earlier nonexclusive grant.
- It doesn’t replace funder compliance. An author covered by MIT’s or Harvard’s policy who also holds NIH, NSF, or a Plan S-aligned grant still has to separately satisfy that funder’s own deposit timing, licence, and repository requirements — the institutional policy and the funder mandate are independent obligations that happen to reinforce each other.
- The opt-out matters operationally. Because waivers are available on request and not automatically tracked against every publisher agreement, an editorial or sponsored-programs office advising authors should confirm, article by article, whether a waiver was invoked before assuming the institutional license is in force.
- Adoption is uneven even within one university. Harvard’s school-by-school rollout (2008–2014) means the policy an author is subject to depends on which Harvard school they’re affiliated with, not a single Harvard-wide rule.
Frequently asked questions
Is this the same thing as Plan S’s Rights Retention Strategy?
No, though the two share vocabulary. Plan S’s Rights Retention Strategy is a funder-side requirement that grant recipients apply a specific open licence (typically CC BY) to their author accepted manuscript, as a condition of the grant. The MIT and Harvard policies are institution-side: a standing license the university itself holds in a faculty member’s articles, adopted by faculty vote and independent of any particular grant.
Does a faculty member have to comply?
Both policies include an opt-out. At MIT, the Provost’s Office will waive the policy for a specific article on written request; Harvard schools operate an equivalent waiver process. Absent a waiver, the license applies automatically to covered articles.
Can a publisher refuse to publish an article because of the policy?
Both universities’ guidance frames the license as something a publisher’s subsequent agreement cannot revoke, since the university’s nonexclusive rights already existed before that agreement was signed — but in practice, if a publisher will not accept the arrangement, an author covered by the policy can request a waiver for that specific article rather than have a submission blocked.
Have other universities adopted similar policies?
Yes — the Harvard/MIT model (often described generically as a “Harvard-style” open access policy) has been adopted by numerous other universities and university systems since 2008, typically through the same faculty-vote, nonexclusive-license, opt-out structure. This guide focuses specifically on MIT and Harvard as the earliest and most extensively documented examples; it is not a comprehensive survey of every institution that has since adopted a comparable policy.
Related CASRAI resources
- Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) — the funder-side mechanism this guide contrasts with
- cOAlition S and Plan S — the funder consortium and mandate this guide distinguishes from institutional policy
- Green open access and Self-Archiving for Green Open Access: A Practical How-To
- Copyright transfer agreement
- Open Access Publishing: Models, Mandates, and Why It Matters
- Scholarly Publishing pillar
