The UK Scholarly Communications Licence

Birkbeck UCU Meeting. 14th March 2017.

Professor Martin Paul Eve, Birkbeck, University of London

The Problems of Open Access

• Many funder policies:
• Different compliance requirements between funders
• Many different publisher policies
• Some publishers have different policies depending on who funds the researcher
• HEFCE policy in particular, differs substantially from other policies and applies to all UK academics
• Some publisher policies are not in line with HEFCE policy
• Difficult to know what to do to comply both with Funder and HEFCE policies
• We are concerned about academics getting into legal trouble by depositing wrong version

We want to change institutional IP policy to fix this

• Want to make it possible for academics to deposit safely/be compliant without worrying about different policies
• Want to preserve academic choice as to where to publish, and academic freedom to sign whatever licence/© transfer agreement is necessary
• Desire to maximise impact of publication (OA + Birkbeck's history of allowing broader access)

A group of 18 UK institutions want to implement policy:

• The university retains a non-exclusive license on journal outputs to:
• make the peer-reviewed manuscript publicly available
• assign it a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND)
• sub-license all authors and their host institutions
• No action from author required (other than deposit)
• The licence is binding on the publisher, provided the publisher has previous knowledge

Already implemented at Harvard, MIT + 70 others

• Can request a waiver for specific outputs if required
• Can publish wherever you like
• The licence is binding on the publisher, provided the publisher has previous knowledge

In lay terms, the changes are:

• Institution retains a non-exclusive right to display the accepted version of your work
• ... that's it. All other rights remain with the author(s), as now.

The End

Thank you!