Elsevier Permits MIT to use Article "Bits"

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Of possible interest from the Chronicle of Higher Education

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March 10, 2008

Elsevier Agrees to Let MIT Use Bits of Journal Articles Online

A major challenge for colleges that want to post lecture 
materials on the Web involves making sure they have permission to 
use the copyrighted images from journals and other sources that 
professors have put in their slides. Today the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology announced that it has reached a deal with 
Elsevier, one of the largest journal publishers, to allow a 
limited amount of material from its journals to be used in MIT's 
OpenCourseWare project.

The publisher hasn't exactly given away the store: The agreement 
allows the project to use up to three illustrations per journal 
article, and up to 100 words of text.

But that will save the OpenCourseWare staff members hours and 
hours of time, and allow them to include some material they might 
not have bothered to ask about in the past, says Steve E. Carson, 
external-relations director for the project. "This is not only a 
cost saver for us, but it also expands the range of things that 
we can publish," he says.

Publishing 400 courses online each year involves tracking down 
permissions for about 6,000 copyrighted items, Mr. Carson says. 
(The project has one full-time and one part-time employee devoted 
to doing just that.)

What if you're not at MIT?

Mark Seeley, vice president and general counsel at Elsevier, says 
the company has also agreed to a new policy on copyright, set up 
by the International Association of Scientific, Technical, & 
Medical Publishers, allowing any college to post small bits of 
journal material online. The policy doesn't allow quite as much 
as the deal with MIT does, however.

Mr. Seeley says Elsevier made the agreement with MIT and agreed 
to the broader copyright policy because it was seeing an 
increasing number of requests from colleges to use small amounts 
of material form its journals. "I think our experience is that 
actually a lot of the request for permissions are relatively 
modest," he says. -- Jeffrey R. Young

Copyright 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education