(24 October 2013) The Open Access Licenses and Agreements Task Force has announced the release of a new report, Open Access Clauses in Publishers’ Licenses: Current State and Lessons Learned. The report presents the results of a review of licenses that secure the rights for authors and/or their institutions to deposit published articles into an OA repository.
As Open Access (OA) policies and laws are being adopted world-wide, the scholarly community is shifting its efforts from advocacy towards practical implementation and support. One of the major routes for making articles open access is through OA repositories. However the variety and lack of clarity of publishers’ policies regarding article deposit can be a significant barrier to author compliance of OA policies.
In order to overcome this barrier, some organizations have successfully negotiated authors’ or deposit rights with publishers in the context of purchasing content licenses. This report documents the existing OA licensing language that has been implemented by organization around the world and presents some suggestions for their successful adoption. The report concludes that OA clauses offer a feasible option for institutions to address some of the obstacles to article deposit into repositories.
Read the full announcement here.
