Upcoming webinar: “The Right To Deposit – Uniform Guidance to Ensure Author Compliance and Public Access”

By admin / March 21, 2024

“The Right To Deposit – Uniform Guidance to Ensure Author Compliance and Public Access” is a free webinar that will be held on April 16th from 11:00-1:30 pm PDT (2:00-3:30 EDT). It will explore the deposit rights environment authors will face under new, zero-embargo public access policies from federal funders, and the role institutions can play in supporting these rights. Authors and librarians at US higher education institutions are encouraged to attend to learn more about the details of these new policies and what their rights are; representatives and staff from funding agencies are also invited to learn more about the rights landscape from an author’s perspective.

This free webinar is organized by the University of California (UC) and Authors Alliance and is co-sponsored by the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL), the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation, and the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC).

We hope you’ll join us! Please register for this event in advance using your employer provided e-mail address so we understand who you are.

Event description

The White House Office of Science and Technology Planning (OSTP) public access guidance (“the Nelson memo”) requires immediate deposit of federally-funded articles into an agency-designated repository for policy compliance. This requirement applies regardless of whether an author chooses to publish open access on a publisher’s website, or publishes under a subscription model.

Most academic authors own the copyright in their work. In addition, many institutions make it easier for authors to see widespread dissemination and reuse of their work through open access policies and repositories. Yet during the publication process, authors encounter choices and contracts that at best create confusion, and at worst attempt to divorce authors from their rights and limit how their work can be distributed and used. At the end of the process, many feel uncertain about what rights to share their articles they have retained: a significant number will have lost benefits they started out with, including clarity around their ability to comply with federal policy and deposit their article in designated public repositories.

This event intends to illuminate the potential failure points along the author’s journey, and highlight the powerful role institutional and funder policy can play in protecting authors, thereby improving the rates at which authors deposit their works and comply with agency policies. Both institutional open access policies and the federal purpose license found in existing federal regulations represent tools to support the rights and responsibilities of authors. Rather than rely on the individual actions of authors to protect their rights one article at a time, policy can create an environment that broadly safeguards author’s rights.