News

New SPARC Europe’s report on rights retention and open licensing in Europe

29th June 2023News, Open Access, Open Science

We are pleased to announce the completion of a study on the current landscape of non-legislative policy practices affecting researchers and authors in the authors’ rights and licensing domain. The freshly published report »Opening Knowledge: Retaining Rights and Licensing in Europe 2023« is an outcome of research conducted by Project Retain led by SPARC Europe, as part of the Knowledge Rights 21 programme

The report showcases progress with institutional rights retention policies in Europe and discusses a variety of open access rights retention policies and options in various contexts. They are fastly accelerating to meet the increased need to comply with national and funder requirements to ensure that IP is retained to publish OA. The report recognizes a diversity of stakeholders who play an important role in enabling access to research publications and to their re-use and the value of dialogue in overcoming fears, misunderstandings, and disagreements.

The text concludes with a set of recommendations: 

  • Institutional policymakers are advised to augment existing policies with elements supporting rights retention on numerous fronts. 
  • Funders and legislators are encouraged to design policies accommodating different contexts following common frameworks that support institutions and their authors advocating for change relating to author rights retention, copyright transfer and open licensing. 
  • Publishers should assist authors and their institutions in retaining sufficient rights over their creations for immediate OA and reusing, respond clearly to rights retention inquiries, set zero embargoes, and use OA CC licences.

We wanted to share these findings with you before the summer. We look forward to campaigning more around this topic and plan to organize events on this important topic in autumn. Please check the Retain web page for updates.

We invite you to read the report ​​and separately published study data set