Opening Up Content in HathiTrust: Using HathiTrust Permissions Agreements to Make Authors’ Work Available Melissa Levine, Lead Copyright Officer, University of Michigan Library Background note: HathiTrust is a repository based at the University of Michigan for the digitized content of some of the nation’s great research libraries. Content is growing daily and already contains more than 5.6 million volumes. Works in the public domain are open to all researchers—whoever and wherever they may be. Access to materials still in copyright is governed by copyright law and permissions granted by individual rights holders. Works that HathiTrust partners do not have rights to make available are not made available—or are made available under very limited circumstances, such as for certified users with disability who need to make use of a screen reader in order to access materials. This article is about steps put in place by the University of Michigan Library to empower authors to open up access to the in-copyright titles that are deposited in the HathiTrust repository. A t the University of Michigan Library, efforts to maximize the amount of legally accessible material in HathiTrust have brought renewed attention to the options available to authors as copyright holders of works. Many scholarly works are out of print and commercially unavailable, thus as a practical matter a tremendous amount of information, thought, and knowledge is unavailable to today’s scholars and students. Print runs for monographs are expensive and historically rather small. Articles, if available at all, are typically accessible only to those people affiliated with a research library that can sustain expensive subscriptions and licenses. HathiTrust seeks ways to open as much content as legally possible with an overarching philosophy consistent with a research library’s commitment to inquiry and concurrent needs for preservation and access, with all of their parallel complexities. Simply, the library is looking for ways to educate scholars RLI 269 14 APRIL 2010 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC