Study into licences used by Open Access journals

The Knowledge Exchange Licensing Expert Group has commissioned a study which examined which licences or licence provisions are being used by open access and hybrid publishers when making their publications available in open access. The study intended to identify a ‘best practice’ licence model framework and to formulate recommendations with respect to an OA licence structure, taking into account the commercial and non-commercial needs of authors as well as the publishers. The study was undertaken by Maverick Outsource Services Ltd. This led to the following recommendations for an optimum licence in an open access journal: The author retains copyright; The author or rightholder grants to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to the work, and besides a licence to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any reasonable purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship; A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository. This includes the permission as stated under 2, in a suitable standard electronic format; The copyright holder can retain the right to restrict commercial use if they wish; The copyright holder provides the publisher with permission to publish, subject to open accessibility of the work in online published form.

The impact of Open Access outside of European Universities

The Open Access movement has encouraged the availability of publicly-funded research papers, data and learning content for barrier-free use of that content without payment by the user. The impact of increasing availability of content to researchers in European universities is understood in terms of easier access to previous research and greater exposure for new research results, bringing benefits to the research community itself. A new culture of informal sharing is evident within the teaching and learning communities and to some extent also within the research community, but as yet the growth in informal sharing has not had a major effect upon the use of formal publication choices. This briefing paper explores the impact of open access upon potential users of research outputs outside the walls of research-led European universities, where the economic value of open access may be even greater than the academic value within universities. The potential impact of open access is understood in many communities but requires a greater volume of open access content to be available for the full potential to be realised. More open access content will become available as the opportunities in open, internet-based digital scholarship are understood. This briefing paper was written in cooperation with SPARC Europe. All links provided in footnotes in this Briefing Paper are to studies available in open access.