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Comments of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Scholarly Communication Department, re: Docket IID ED-2015-OS-0105 Open Licensing Requirement for Direct Grant Programs
(2015)
Abstract
We write in support of the Secretary’s proposal to require that “all Department grantees awarded direct competitive grant funds openly license to the public all copyrightable intellectual property created with Department grant funds.”
Unfortunately, the commercial evolution of the scholarly journal market has not fully exploited the possibilities of open access content. Scholarly publishers still use bargaining leverage on publication to exert monopoly control over federally- funded publications, rather than, for instance, building services on and around open content. This has hampered the development of the market for these resources, and consequently, even works that are technically publicly available, via, for instance, the Department’s non-exclusive license, are under-utilized— harder to discover than they should be, and thus much less likely to be used and built upon.
We thus fully support the Department’s proposal to remedy this problem, enhance access to the fruits of its competitively awarded public grants, and, ultimately, enhance development of a market built upon upstream access to openly licensed materials.
Keywords
- open access
Disciplines
Publication Date
December 3, 2015
Citation Information
Marilyn Billings, Laura Quilter, Charlotte Roh and Jeremy L Smith. "Comments of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Scholarly Communication Department, re: Docket IID ED-2015-OS-0105 Open Licensing Requirement for Direct Grant Programs" (2015) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/laura_quilter/48/
Creative Commons license
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY International License.