Legislating Open Access: Making the Case for a Secondary Publishing Right in Canada

Abstract

This paper examines the potential of Secondary Publishing Rights (SPR) as a legal solution to safeguard Green Open Access (OA) and promote free and global access to Canadian research. SPR grants journal article authors the right to deposit a version of a finished article in an institutional or disciplinary repository, regardless of publisher agreements. If implemented in Canada, SPR will empower researchers, allowing them to make their work OA while also providing them with an easy path to ensuring compliance with OA funder mandates. In this paper, we compare SPR to alternatives like Rights Retention Strategies (RRS) and collective licensing, highlighting the variations of SPR implemented in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Bulgaria. Adopting SPR in Canada will significantly improve public access to research, strengthen Canada's global research impact, and create a more equitable scholarly publishing landscape.

Keywords: Open Access, Copyright, Secondary Publishing Rights, Rights Retention Strategy