Authors Alliance and SPARC Publish New White Paper on Open Access and U.S. Federal Information Policy

From an Authors Alliance Blog Post:

Authors Alliance and SPARC have released the first of four planned white papers addressing legal issues surrounding open access to scholarly publications under the 2022 OSTP memo (the “Nelson Memo”). The white papers are part of a larger project (described here) to support legal pathways to open access.

This first paper discusses the “Federal Purpose License,” which is newly relevant to discussions of federal public access policies in light of the Nelson Memo.

The white paper is available here and supporting materials are here.

The FPL, found in 2 C.F.R. § 200.315(b), works like any other copyright licensing agreement between two parties. It is a voluntary agreement between author and agency that, as a condition of federal funding, the agency reserves a nonexclusive license to “reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for Federal purposes and to authorize others to do so.” The FPL was updated, effective October 1, to clarify that the reserved license specifically includes the right to deposit copyrighted works produced pursuant to a grant in agency-designated public access repositories.

Read the Complete Introductory Blog Post (about 480 words)

Direct to Full Text (via SSRN)

Filed under: Funding, Journal Articles, News, Open Access