Authors Alliance and SPARC have announced a new collaboration aimed at addressing critical legal issues surrounding open access to scholarly publications. This initiative is particularly focused on helping federal agencies, universities, and researchers navigate the legal landscape in light of the "Nelson Memo" issued by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2022.
The Nelson Memo, titled “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” represents a significant update to federal open access policies. For more than a decade, federal policy required agencies with research and development budgets over $100 million to make grant-funded research publicly accessible online. The Nelson Memo expands these requirements to all federal agencies, regardless of budget, and eliminates the 12-month embargo period previously allowed for articles post-publication.
Given the substantial changes introduced by the Nelson Memo, there are important legal questions that need to be addressed to ensure smooth implementation. To this end, Authors Alliance and SPARC will produce a series of white papers that clarify these issues. One key focus will be the "Federal Purpose License," a pre-existing license that all federal grant-making agencies hold in works produced with federal funds. The white papers will explore the history and scope of this license, its potential application to Creative Commons and other public licenses, and any constitutional or statutory challenges that might arise. Additionally, the papers will examine whether the license applies to all versions of a work and whether university intellectual property policies might require modification in response.
Beyond the white paper series, the project will convene a group of experts to update the SPARC Author Addendum, a tool created in 2007 to help authors retain their rights and provide open access to their scholarship. Given the significant changes in open access and scholarly publishing over the past two decades, the Addendum will be revised to better reflect the current landscape and support authors in achieving their scholarly goals.
The final aspect of the project involves developing a framework for universities to recover rights for faculty in their works, especially backlist and out-of-print books that are not available in electronic form. While the open access movement has made great strides in providing free access to scholarly articles, books and older journal articles have not seen the same level of progress. The new framework will help universities identify opportunities to recover and relicense these works under open access terms.
Leading this initiative is Eric Harbeson, who recently joined Authors Alliance as the Scholarly Publications Legal Fellow. Eric brings a wealth of experience as a librarian, archivist, and musicologist. His work in advocating for libraries' and archives' copyright interests, particularly in the preservation of music and sound recordings, makes him a valuable addition to the project. Eric’s prior publications include a report on the Music Modernization Act and two scholarly music editions.
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