What is the Federal Purpose License, and how does it interact with the Open Access policy and with publishing contracts?
I have a grant from the federal government and my research must be publicly available. Does the Open Access Policy help me?
Answer
The Federal Purpose License, also known as the Government Use License (2 CFR 200.315), gives the U.S. government royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable rights to reproduce, publish or use the government-funded work "for Federal purposes." It also gives the agency the authority to authorize others to use the work. Public access mandates of U.S. federal funders are based on the Federal Purpose License.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst Open Access policy is an institutional open access policy whereby the University claims non-exclusive, irrevocable, global rights to share a faculty researcher's author-accepted manuscript of a scholarly article, book chapter or conference paper. The UMass Amherst Open Access Policy also gives the university "prior license" to the manuscript.
The Federal Purpose License and the UMass Open Access Policy are different but both are non-exclusive licenses and therefore mutually compatible.
An author-publisher agreement is a contract between those two parties to publish a paper under the terms of the contract. Read the contract carefully. If the contract requires the author to warrant that the publisher has exclusive rights or that there is no prior license on the paper, and the research is federally funded or authored by a UMass Amherst faculty since 2016, then the author cannot sign the contract without making a false claim. You may request a waiver to the UMass Open Access Policy, but this does not waive any obligations you may have under funder open access policies or grant requirements.