Sample Waiver

Introduction

What follows is the letter Harvard uses to grant a waiver of an open access license to those who have requested one.

Sample Waiver Text

Dear ______ ,

Pursuant to the Open Access Policy adopted by ______ on ______, this communication serves to notify you that your request for a waiver of the Open Access license for ______ in ______ has been granted. This waiver may not be revoked by Harvard, and Harvard will have no license under the policy unless you choose to relinquish the waiver.

Independent of the waiver, we recommend that you deposit your article in the DASH repository as specified in the ______ Open Access Policy. You can do so regardless of the waiver status of the article or any agreement that you may have signed with a publisher. The simplest method for depositing your article is to email the accepted author manuscript (the language approved by peer review) to osc@harvard.edu or to contact your school's open access liaison.

In cases where you receive a waiver of the ______ policy, the publisher's agreement may provide sufficient rights to allow copies of your article to be made publicly available in the Harvard repository. The publisher may ask that certain conditions be met, some of which the repository can easily accommodate (for example, an embargo period during which the article will not be made publicly available).

Even if you conclude that your article cannot be made publicly available, depositing a copy of your article in the repository is useful for archival and indexing purposes. The bibliographic information will be made available for harvesting and indexing by search engines, such as Google Scholar, creating increased awareness of your article.

If you have any questions about the waiver of this policy, the ______ Policy for Open Access, or depositing in the Harvard repository, please visit the Office for Scholarly Communication web site at https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/, write to osc@harvard.edu, or contact your school's open access liaison.

Important note for NIH-funded authors: Even though you are being granted a waiver of the application of the ______ policy to your article specified above, if that article is subject to the NIH Public Access Policy because it is a peer-reviewed manuscript that arose, in whole or in part, from NIH-funded research and was accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008, your obligations under the NIH policy cannot be waived. You must be sure to reserve rights sufficient to comply with the NIH policy when you enter into a publication agreement for the article. For this purpose, you can use an addendum that Harvard has developed to deal specifically with the NIH Public Access Policy. To create a copy of that addendum, or for more information on the NIH requirements, please visit https://www.countway.harvard.edu/publicaccess.