Study finds pro-open policies are rare among scholarly publishers

Representative rebuffs conclusions, saying publishers are ‘highly supportive’ of open access

Scholarly publishers with “open access-friendly” policies remain a rarity, according to a report by the open-science advocacy group Sparc Europe—although a publishing representative has pushed back against the findings.

In the report on publishers’ copyright and licensing policies, published on 28 September, authors led by Chris Morrison, a copyright and licensing compliance officer at the University of Kent, said that some scholarly publishers do have “open access-friendly” policies, such as entering into non-exclusive licence agreements rather than exclusive ones, using CC-BY licences and imposing no embargo or short embargoes for self-archiving.