address the barriers to sharing content between repositories.3 Developing standard author-rights language that libraries could use in negotiating content licenses emerged from the discussions as a significant action item. The group felt that this would be an important step to reduce the barriers created by the fragmented landscape of author-rights arrangements that can result from leaving all negotiation up to individual authors. This approach also complements strategies to develop institutionally based policies like the one recently adopted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty.4 Including author-rights language in university-wide site licenses for content can remove the burden from individual authors, and clarify and simplify the rights environment, making research as openly accessible as technology now allows in order to speed science and exchange of ideas. Library content license negotiations offer a pre-existing tool to serve this purpose. While individual author agreements can amount to thousands of individual transactions each year at a single institution, library-publisher agreements are annual or multi-year arrangements with a broader compass, covering many journals in a single transaction. These library content licenses describe policies for use of content by a given institution’s users, making it a logical extension to expand these licenses to cover author and university rights to the work included in content that is authored at that institution. This method balances all three legs of the scholarly publishing stool—authors, universities, and publishers—in a single agreement, addressing one of the discontinuities of the existing scholarly publishing system, in which universities buy back content released by their authors in separate transactions with the same publishers. Simply put, there is both elegance and economy in linking access to a publisher’s electronic journals with rights for the authors who have supplied articles contained in those journals. As a practical matter, author-rights language could be negotiated as a separate agreement. But this option undermines both the efficiency to be gained by a combined negotiation and the leverage inherent in the desire to finalize the license agreement, a document that is already negotiated between the university and the publisher and which is of vital importance to both parties since key journal access hangs in the balance. RLI 263 34 Author-Rights Language in Library Content Licenses ( C O N T I N U E D ) APRIL 2009 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC …library content licenses describe policies for use of content by a given institution’s users, making it a logical extension to expand these licenses to cover author and university rights to the work included in content that is authored at that institution.