Policy Observatory
Amendment to Dutch copyright law (article 22f)a) strengthen the position of scientific authors vis-à-vis publishers and would give support to the NWO’s Open Access (OA) policy for the Green Road to Dutch Science. The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) is the main public funding agency in the country for the dissemination of the results of the research that it finances (both publications and data).
On 1 July 2015 the new Dutch Copyright Act (Wet Auteurscontractenrecht, Staatsblad 2015, 257; in Dutch only) became effective. Section 25 fa has been inserted to state that authors are legally entitled to make the results of their research open access available.
Today is the first day of Open Access Week. EFF is joining SPARC and dozens of other organizations all week to discuss the importance of open access.
Open access is the practice of making research and other materials freely available online, ideally under licenses that allow anyone to share and adapt them. By removing barriers like subscription fees or institutional connections, open access publishing lets more people participate in science and culture.
A previous version of FASTR was first introduced in 2013. FASTR has strong support on both sides of the aisle, but it still hasn't come up for a vote in either chamber of Congress.
A US federal district court has ruled against Public.Resource.Org, forbiding their practice of providing public and open access to documents that have become law through “incorporation by reference”, meaning that they are initially created through private standards organizations and later incorporated into federal law. In the views of the EFF, the district court’s decision suggests that laws can be copyrighted and put behind paywalls as long as they were first written down by someone outside of government.
After a 2-day meeting in Brussels, EU member states have agreed on an ambitious new open-access (OA) target involving that all scientific papers should be freely available by 2020.