Using copyright law to enforce open access

An amendment to the Dutch copyright law now allows researchers to make their articles available to the public following a ‘reasonable period’ after the work was first published. The Dutch universities are implementing this amendment in a national pilot project starting in January 2019.

The Taverne amendment

In July 2015, the Taverne amendment to Dutch copyright law, named after former MP Joost Taverne, who introduced the amendment in Parliament, came into effect. In essence, it states that academic articles resulting from research that is wholly or partly publicly funded may be placed in open access by the author after a reasonable period of time. This means that university staff no longer need to stipulate or reserve this right in agreements with publishers. The explanatory memorandum to the amendment states explicitly that it is meant to fill the growing need to make research output available in open access.

Pilot

The pilot aims to make a subset of the articles of participating researchers at each institution available through the institutional repository observing this reasonable embargo period. The primary goal of the pilot is to facilitate the researcher’s right to make their work public. This means that embargo periods, as laid down in contracts between publishers and researchers, may be overruled, as this new section of the law is considered to be imperative. Hence, implementing the amendment will contribute to the goal of more open access to publications. It is the ambition of the Dutch government to achieve 100% open access to scientific and scholarly papers that are produced with public money by 2020.
The universities would also like to assess the level of support from researchers for these open access policies and consider how to raise that support if necessary. Finally, the VSNU (and consequently the universities) want to determine if and how publishers will respond to this new reality.

Participate

We, the University of Groningen Library (UB), will be selecting a sample of participating researchers on a voluntary basis, distributed evenly across faculties and disciplines, albeit with a slight accent on the humanities and the social sciences. This means that we may ask you to participate in the pilot. If you decide to participate, the UB will bring your work first published in 2018 under the new copyright law regime in Pure.

A national project team has prepared an implementation plan that will be followed by all universities and university libraries (where needed with some local adaptations). Legal experts from universities and the VSNU have prepared for different outcomes and considered the risks of the pilot, including the likelihood of legal steps being taken against individual researchers by publishers, which they have deemed very low. You will receive a licence agreement to sign, in which you grant the UG a non-exclusive right to make your work available to the public through Pure. It also contains a guarantee that the UG will assume all legal and financial aid in the unlikely event of legal proceedings by a publisher against you as a researcher due to an alleged infringement of copyright. The UB is cooperating closely with the Legal Office (ABJZ) of the UG during this pilot.

If you, after reading this, cannot wait until we approach you, please let us know by sending an email to openaccess rug.nl or openaccess umcg.nl. Of course, you can also contact us if you have any questions concerning the pilot, the Taverne amendment or open access in general.