Why The Failure By Funders To Require Academics To Retain Copyright In Their Papers Is The Biggest Obstacle To Open Access Today

"The solution to this problem is simple: researchers should retain the copyright in their work, and the N8 Research Partnership now requires its members to enforce this if a publisher refuses to allow a CC BY license. However, the new policy does not make this mandatory for the other ways of publishing – Gold open access or Read & Publish. This is a huge mistake. There is no reason for a researcher to assign their copyright to a publisher – a non-exclusive license is all that the latter requires. By allowing the practise to continue, N8 is implicitly condoning it in some situations. N8 is not alone in this, but the failure by funders to require rights retention as a matter of course is perhaps the biggest obstacle to rolling out full open access around the world today."