Growing clamour for EU law on open-access publishing

Group of science and technology universities backs enshrining secondary publishing rights in law

The Cesaer group of European science and technology universities has joined a growing push for EU laws to protect researchers’ rights to republish in open-access repositories.

The Association of European Research Libraries and Knowledge Rights 21—a copyright-reform project backed by several academic organisations—is campaigning to establish a legal right for authors to publish certain versions of their publicly funded research papers online alongside publication of the final version elsewhere. This right is known as a secondary publishing right.