The Federal purpose license is a policy in existing federal regulations: “The Federal awarding agency reserves a royalty-free, nonexclusive and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for Federal purposes, and to authorize others to do so.”

A 2022 White House directive would make a change to this policy in response to calls for more open access expansion; i.e., making federally funded research freely available to the public immediately after publication of the research. If the directive goes forward, authors who use grant funding to produce research will be required to deposit their work into agency-designated public-access repositories as soon as it is published. That process would eliminate the current option for authors or their publishers to place a 12-month embargo on public access to government-funded research publications (rule in place since 2013). The purpose of lifting the embargo as described in the 2022 White House memo (known as the Nelson memo) is to promote “equity and advance the work of restoring the public’s trust in Government science, and to advance American scientific leadership.” These changes will impact authors, their institutions, and the offices that deal with research funding and grant compliance. Academic libraries, especially at doctoral-granting institutions, will play a key role in advancing open access through multiple pathways and engaging authors in scholarly publishing and research data management.

The Nelson memo calls for implementation of the policy change by 2026.  Groups supporting the change include open-access advocates and library groups. They believe the change will provide grant recipients with a clear understanding of their obligations as authors and facilitate better compliance with funder requirements. Opponents include many members of Congress and many academic publishers who contend that the new policy would limit researchers’ ability to maintain control of their published work and would cut into the multi-billion-dollar academic publishing industry’s profit margins.

The current academic publishing industry’s business model relies on authors’ willingness to submit their work for free—or even pay to publish it—and the publisher’s ability to sell that research to academic libraries through expensive journal subscriptions. The Nelson memo raises a dilemma for publishers: determine how the industry can and should respond to increasing calls for open-access expansion by adapting their business models and aligning more closely with what authors and funding agencies want; or staying with the existing model that depends on retaining as much exclusive rights as they can for authors’ articles.