Open-access expansion threatens academic publishing industry

"Even as federal agencies work to implement the Nelson memo—a 2022 White House directive to make federally funded research freely available to the public immediately after publication—members of Congress are joining academic publishers in pushing back....

As tensions over open-access expansion mount in Washington, a growing number of academic library groups across the nation has expressed concern about the challenges of helping authors learn to comply with the new deposit policy, which many may encounter for the first time after the Nelson memo takes effect.

“In a worst-case scenario, authors who do not understand their grant requirements and the legal landscape may face negative enforcement actions from funders, disputes about copyrights or contracts, or roadblocks to publishing,” reads a recently drafted petition signed by dozens of individual librarians and library groups, including the Authors Alliance and SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

The petition encourages federal agencies to “level the playing field for authors” by applying the federal purpose license, a decades-old regulation that gives federal agencies that funded the publication of research “the royalty-free, nonexclusive and irrevocable right” to reproduce, publish or otherwise use the work.

Although federal purpose license advocates believe it will “provide grant recipients with a clear understanding of their obligations as authors [and] facilitate better compliance with funder requirements,” the House Appropriations Committee’s recently advanced bill prohibits agencies from exerting “broad” federal purpose authority...."