Yesterday, in Day 3, we talked about keeping your rights, but you may already have the right to share your work. Today we’ll talk about how to check what your options are.

Day 4: Check your options—you may already be allowed to share your work at no cost!

By the end of 2025, all US federal funding agencies are expected to have policies requiring immediate public access to articles with results supported by federally funded grants.

So far, we’ve covered some of the repository options that exist, how to determine whether you have the legal right to deposit your current work in a repository, and how to plan to retain your rights for future articles.

But what if you’ve written and published something in a journal and the publisher is unwilling to give you back your copyright? There may still be a way for your work to be available in repositories if it’s covered by an institution’s or a funder’s open access policy.

Daily to-do: Find and read the open access policies that apply to you and make a note in your reference document under “Policies”

Step 1: Read your funder’s Open Access or Public Access policy

In addition to implementing policies that require you to make your work open access or publicly accessible, some funding agencies may soon create a similar policy that will automatically give them a non-exclusive right to reproduce your work in their repositories.

Many funders already have some kind of policy that requires authors to make the articles resulting from research they fund to be put in a public access repository within 12 months of publication. These policies are often referred to either as open access or public access policies.

Over the next year, US federal funder policies will be updated to reflect new requirements that were announced in 2022. By the end of 2025, all federal agencies are expected to have a policy in place to make articles immediately available to the public. Some agencies are expected to roll out their policies sooner; NIH’s policy, for example, is expected to take effect in October 2025.

For federal funding agencies, an existing policy gives the government an automatic, non-exclusive right to your work. (One quick and important note: this only gives your funding agency some rights to share your article. It does not automatically grant control of the underlying discovery. The copyright of an article is not the same as a patent for a discovery. If you have questions about patents or the commercialization of your research, contact UMN Technology Commercialization.)

Take some time today to figure out what your funder’s current policy is and whether their new open access or public access policy will be changing next year! As a starting point, review your funding award documentation (Notice of Grant Award, or “NOGA”) and consult the Libraries’ website.

Need help figuring out what your funder’s policy is or will be? Contact openaccess@umn.edu or your subject liaison librarian.

Step 2: Read the University of Minnesota Open Access Policy

The University of Minnesota’s policy on Open Access to Scholarly Articles may provide a way to make your article openly available regardless of your journal/publisher’s policy.

Through the policy, the University has a right to post open access versions of articles by UMN authors (with your consent, as the author!), that predates any agreement with a journal. By exercising this option, journal policies become less important and you can post whatever version you like, whenever you like, to the University Digital Conservancy or another non-profit article repository (i.e., not ResearchGate or other academic social networks).

The policy applies to all:

• scholarly articles*
• authored or co-authored by faculty and “faculty-like” individuals†
• as part of their employment with the University of Minnesota‡

*Typically articles published in peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings

†Meaning faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, researchers, scholars, and any other employees who meet the definition of “faculty-like” in the University Copyright Policy will be affected by this policy

‡and completed after January 1, 2015.

The University of Minnesota is not alone in having an open access policy; several other Big Ten institutions have one, and Harvard’s policy is considered a model for others. That said, if you rely on the OA policy to deposit your work, your publisher might get annoyed. We haven’t heard of any publisher raising any issues with this path, but you should be aware of that possibility!

The policy is very straightforward but can also be very complex—so before relying on the OA Policy to deposit your article in a repository, please contact us at openaccess@umn.edu or copyinfo@umn.edu.