Author rights & open licensing strategies

The European Union’s Council conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing (2023) state that there is a need for action in regard to copyright transfer issues and researchers’ knowledge and awareness of their rights as authors. The council welcomes national secondary publishing rights legislation as a method of encouraging authors to self-archive the accepted manuscript version of their published works. 

Several routes can be chosen to ensure immediate open access to scholarly publications, and the issues in relation copyright legislation and licensing are many. The main question of this session is: How can stakeholders in academic publishing - publishers as well as universities and libraries - work together to ensure re-useability and immediate openness, from their own perspectives?  

The session highlights and discusses different strategies to strengthen and secure author rights in open publishing, as an important part of the transition to open science. Topics of interest include rights retention, secondary publishing rights and issues concerning copyright agreements between authors and publishers.