The pushback against the use in of a federal purpose license - which grants any Federal agency that funds research “a royalty-free, nonexclusive and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for Federal purposes” for publishing US government funded research as a way to enact the White House open access policy is gaining support in the US Congress according to a recent report from FYI, the science policy news service of the American Institute of Physics (AIP). Given the fact that the proposed federal R&D budget ask for 2024 is $210 billion and touches basically every aspect of US science and technology research – depending on field federal money can constitute almost all domestic research funds available – this is no small matter.
As readers will recall, previous efforts to gut US federal public access mandates centered around efforts by conservative Republicans on the Appropriations Committee to defund programs with any mention of DEI initiatives, which did not sit well with other lawmakers. This time however with a more narrowly defined (i.e., focused) issue to home in on, there appears to be a greater chance that opposition to policies promulgated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and most recently described in the so-called Nelson Memo of August 2022, will be effective.
The idea of the federal purpose license is not new and traces its roots back to initiatives set in motion in 1976 during the Carter administration. Originally the license was meant to cover documents and articles used within government agencies for such purposes as planning and developing policy with the intention of removing barriers to internal use of such things as published reports and scientific papers and speeding up the transmission of information within government circle. However, since its inception the concept of federal purpose has gradually grown beyond its original purpose to the point that some pro-open access organizations – including parts of the librarian community and open access advocates such as SPARC – maintain that it can be said to cover all published outputs created with Federal funds, no matter where they are stored and by whom they are used.
Forcing researchers who receive Federal research funds to publish their research under a federal purpose license limits researcher’s choices and disempowers them say critics – which includes many scholarly publishers – by removing their right to control who gets to use their research and under what conditions. Until now, the opponents of federal purpose mandates have not counted member of Congress amongst their number, but if things continue the way they appear to be going, that may be about to change.