The University of California (UC) and Authors Alliance hosted an event on April 16, 2024 to explore the deposit rights environment authors currently face and the role institutions can play supporting these rights, create deeper national awareness of rights issues related to the Federal purpose license, and discuss benefits of invoking the Federal purpose license. This event was co-sponsored by the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL), the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), the HBCU Library Alliance, the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC), and the Texas Digital Library (TDL).
The White House Office of Science and Technology Planning (OSTP) public access guidance (“the Nelson memo”) requires immediate deposit of federally-funded articles into an agency-designated repository for policy compliance. This requirement applies regardless of whether an author chooses to publish open access on a publisher’s website, or publishes under a subscription model.
Most academic authors own the copyright in their work. In addition, many institutions make it easier for authors to see widespread dissemination and reuse of their work through open access policies and repositories. Yet during the publication process, authors encounter choices and contracts that at best create confusion, and at worst attempt to divorce authors from their rights and limit how their work can be distributed and used. At the end of the process, many feel uncertain about what rights to share their articles they have retained: a significant number will have lost benefits they started out with, including clarity around their ability to comply with federal policy and deposit their article in designated public repositories.
This event intends to illuminate the potential failure points along the author’s journey, and highlight the powerful role institutional and funder policy can play in protecting authors, thereby improving the rates at which authors deposit their works and comply with agency policies. Both institutional open access policies and the federal purpose license found in existing federal regulations represent tools to support the rights and responsibilities of authors. Rather than rely on the individual actions of authors to protect their rights one article at a time, policy can create an environment that broadly safeguards author’s rights.
Günter Waibel, California Digital Library
Dave Hansen, Authors Alliance
Rich Schneider, UC San Francisco
Katie Fortney, California Digital Library
Katie Zimmerman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sandra Enimil, Yale University
Maurice York, Big Ten Academic Alliance