Model Language for Author Rights in Library Content Licenses Ivy Anderson, Director of Collections, California Digital Library, on behalf of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Author-Rights Language in Library Content Licenses A cademic and research libraries today are increasingly charged with facilitating the management and dissemination of the scholarly output of their parent institutions. This activity frequently takes the form of organizing the deposit of scholarly work such as research articles and working papers in institutional, national, or subject-based repositories in order to make these works broadly available to other interested scholars and the wider public. Authors of scholarly work also increasingly wish to retain significant rights in the work that they produce rather than transferring all such rights to an external publisher. Although these activities and expectations are becoming widespread, many barriers exist to their straightforward adoption. Not the least among such barriers is the difficulty in negotiating agreements between authors and publishers permitting the retention of an appropriate set of rights to support these activities. Scalable solutions are needed to ensure that a consistent bundle of rights can be retained by institutionally affiliated authors to support emerging standards in information dissemination and repository services. The content licenses that libraries negotiate with publishers offer a ready vehicle to address this need. Because these agreements exist at the level of the institution and the publisher, content licenses are well positioned to facilitate scalable and consistent arrangements for managing research output at the institutional level. Licenses introduce a degree of efficiency that can make the necessary rights transactions significantly more economical for all parties. A number of institutions in recent years have sought to include author self- archiving rights in the content licenses they negotiate. For example, language addressing the right of authors to self-archive their work was introduced into the Joint Information Systems Committee’s “Model NESLi2 Licence for Journals” in RLI 269 11 APRIL 2010 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC