Authors Alliance and SPARC are pleased to share the publication of a third white paper in the joint Legal Pathways to Open Access project.
Federal Grants and Institutional IP Policies addresses the thorny and long-debated question in copyright: who is the author of academic scholarly works? Without taking a position, the paper shows how the question is still very much unsettled, and as a result institutions would do well to craft policies that account for any of three possible outcomes should courts one day rule definitively. The paper makes three simple recommendations for institutions looking to deal with a very complex problem.
See the Authors Alliance announcement. On the project page, there are links to previous papers in series, Open Access and U.S. Federal Information Policy and The Legal Basis for U.S. Federal Public Access Mandates.