Public Access Mandates

UT System Board of Regents Rule 90101 covers intellectual property output from sponsored projects in the University setting, including academic copyright, and publication and use of scholarly articles and research data.

Historically, the Board of Regents has not asserted an ownership interest in copyright of scholarly or educational materials (among other items) related to a faculty author’s academic or professional field, regardless of the medium of expression. The Regents have always encouraged faculty creators to manage their copyrights consistent with best practices and applicable institutional policies.

The Board of Regents recognizes that it and its member universities strive to attract private and public sources of high quality sponsored research funding, and for its faculty to receive that support. As such, if desirable research sponsorship is to grow and continue, the Board of Regents and its member universities must from time to time accede to the requirements of sponsor terms.

Recently, certain research sponsor guidelines have changed. Many funders, including federal agencies and private foundations, now mandate public availability of specific publication of research data and related scholarly works.

Tools and Resources

As you prepare to comply with the Public Access mandate from your sponsor (a federal agency or a private foundation) you will often need to present those requirements to your publisher at the time of publication. In order to assist with that, we have created a list of resources, below.

Publication Addendum from SPARC

The SPARC Publication Addendum was created by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). SPARC works to enable the public sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education. Publishers often take more rights than are required for publication, so SPARC came up with a Publication Addendum that leaves more rights with the author than what traditional publication agreements do. As this agreement allows for the rights to reproduce, to distribute, to publicly perform, and to publicly display the Article in any medium for non-commercial purposes, this should allow you to deposit the work in the required place as required by the terms of the grant.

This site/page was adapted from Scholarly Communications at The University of Texas at Arlington, CC BY-NC 4.0. originally created by personnel in the Division of Scholarly Communications at the University of Texas at Arlington.