The Government Policies That Shape Open Access

October 21-27, 2024, is International Open Access Week. The term “open access” refers to removing the legal, financial, and technical barriers to accessing scholarly and other creative works. Every year during Open Access Week, we give a little extra attention to the benefits that an open and more permissive approach to the distribution and use of copyrighted works can have. This year’s theme, “Community over Commercialization,” turns our focus to how open access can support and foster the interests of the public and the academic community by providing fair and equitable access to scholarship to all.

Because copyright in the United States automatically attaches to any work that is original and fixed in a tangible medium of expression, without the need to publish, register with the federal government, or do anything else, open access typically relies on open licenses to remove or reduce the use restrictions that inherently come with copyright protection. A copyright license is a legal permission offered by rightsholders to allow others to use their works in various ways. Open licenses are a specific type of license that largely or entirely removes the copyright restrictions on a work and promotes downstream use, reuse, and remixing by the public.

The most well-known open licenses are probably the Creative Commons licenses. Founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred, Creative Commons produced their eponymous licenses to enable rightsholders to promote the use of their works, while also allowing them to put some relatively minor stipulations on that use. These stipulations are: BY, which requires attribution; NC, which prohibits commercial uses; ND, which prohibits derivative uses; and SA, which requires downstream uses of the work to follow the same license. So, a CC-BY-NC license allows others to use a work, as long as they include proper attribution and don’t use it for commercial purposes.  

Of course, as the name suggests, open access isn’t just about being able reuse and remix other works; it’s also about being able to access those works in the first place. Open access proponents stand for the belief that making more scholarly and creative works publicly available and free of significant restrictions can bolster the creation of new research, lead to new insights and discoveries, and promote creativity in ways that would be limited by restricting access.

For these reasons, the White House recently issued a directive to federal agencies supporting open access to federal funded research. Two years ago, on August 25, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a memorandum on “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research.” Called the “Nelson Memo” after the Acting Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Alondra Nelson, this document directed federal agencies to develop plans to ensure that the research they support is openly available to the public. It held that: “To promote equity and advance the work of restoring the public’s trust in Government science, and to advance American scientific leadership, now is the time to amend federal policy to deliver immediate public access to federally funded research.” Accordingly, “Federal agencies should update or develop new public access plans for ensuring, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, that all peer-reviewed scholarly publications authored or coauthored by individuals or institutions resulting from federally funded research are made freely available and publicly accessible by default in agency-designated repositories without any embargo or delay after publication.”

The Nelson Memo did not, however, specify how to comply with its open access mandate.  Instead, it required federal agencies to develop implementation plans December 31, 2024. And as we rapidly approach that date, what does this mean? How will people comply with this memo? Unfortunately, the answers to those questions are still unclear. We know that federally funded scholarly work will have to be made publicly available, but we do not know exactly how. Nevertheless, whatever happens, the public will benefit from wider access to federally funded research. Certainly, this is in the interest of “community over commercialization.”  

The Penn Libraries are holding several events to celebrate International Open Access Week this year, including one about the Nelson Memo. You can find a list of events for OA week (and more!) on our events calendar.