Author Rights

The Federal Purpose License, also known as the Government Use License, is the federal regulation (2 CFR 200.315) that allows agencies to enact public access policies. In most cases, the grant recipient retains copyright of their work but must grant the federal agency this non-exclusive right as part of the grant agreement. For more information about federal agencies' open access and data sharing policies, please refer to the Open Access and Data Sharing Mandates LibGuide.

Under the Federal Purpose License, "[t]he Federal 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. This includes the right to require recipients and subrecipients to make such works available through agency-designated public access repositories." More specifically, this license grants federal agencies the right to:

1. Obtain, reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the data produced under a Federal award; and
2. Authorize others to receive, reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the data for Federal purposes.

The Government Use License is also described in 45 CFR 75.322, which is incorporated by reference in every NIH grant agreement, which means it applies to all NIH grants even if the agreement was signed before the current policy was established. The specifics of how this non-exclusive license is used depends on the granting agency, but it is likely to be very similar for all U.S. federal agencies.

In order to comply with U.S. federal public access policy, authors need to retain the right to make a version of their work publicly available in the funding agency's repository. Open Access (OA) publishing options allow this sort of compliance. If you publish in an OA journal or pay for OA publication in a hybrid journal, you will almost certainly be able to comply with any U.S. federal funder's public access mandate. Note that some funders may have specific license requirements and check their requirements carefully. The Open Access and Data Sharing Mandates LibGuide can help you with this.

If you are not publishing OA or are otherwise unsure whether a journal or publisher meets your funder's requirements, here are some terms to look for in publisher policies and contracts. 

• Author Accepted Manuscript. Also known as Final Peer-Reviewed Manuscript or Postprint; the author's final manuscript including all revisions from the peer-review process, but without the publisher's final formatting and copyediting. This is typically the version of the article that federal funders ask for, and many publishing contracts grant the author more rights in this version than in the Final Published Article.
• Author Warranties/Representations. Most publishing contracts will include a section titled Author Warranties or Author Representations, which contains a series of statements that the author must agree with in order to sign the contract. Authors grant the NIH a "non-exclusive license" by accepting a funding award, so any contract requiring that the article is not subject to any previous licenses is inconsistent with the NIH Grants Policy Statement. However, NIH-funded authors can agree that they have not previously granted any exclusive licenses, because the Government Use License is non-exclusive.
• Self-archiving rights (Green OA). Authors can comply if they retain the right to "self-archive" or "deposit" their Author Accepted Manuscript or Final Published Article in the funder-designated repository. Publishing contracts often allow authors to self-archive in some places (e.g., a personal website, a noncommercial repository), but prohibit self-archiving in others. Authors should make sure that they have the right to self-archive in the funder-designated repository.
• Zero embargo. Under the previous Public Access Policy, authors were allowed a 12-month "embargo" period before their article had to be made publicly available, and many publishers' policies still require an embargo. In order to comply with the new policy, authors need to make sure that the publisher allows them to make their Author Accepted Manuscript available immediately upon publication, i.e., with a "zero embargo." 

If you are not publishing OA and your publisher does not explicitly allow you to self-archive the Author Accepted Manuscript, deposit it in a federal public repository, or otherwise meet the requirements of your funder's sharing mandates, then the Federal Purpose License may be useful.

You can also consult the below guides to identify journals and publishers that will comply with federal funders' sharing mandates by default: