Germany’s Shocking Court Ruling Strikes Down Open Access Mandate—What This Means for Academic Freedom and Research Worldwide
As can be seen in the Baden-Württemberg case, what begins as “author protection” can quickly become an author obligation. The plaintiffs did not object to the seemingly benign “rights retention” until it morphed into de facto (if not de jure) “rights removal.” Many in our industry believe that the imposition of a deposit obligation is the ultimate if unstated goal of many SPR advocates.
As the Court in Baden-Württemberg noted, it is one thing for SPR to prevent authors from exclusively giving their rights to publishers and wholly another to then mandate the exercise of those rights as a condition of employment or affiliation. As set forth in the English-language press release of the Court: “That the addressees of the provision are limited to persons involved in higher education does not alter the fact that the affected persons are called on to exercise their legal rights to secondary publication which belong to them as authors of the relevant academic papers.” Whatever the intentions, SPR is mainly going to contribute to the degradation of the record of science. It does not deliver the reader to the authoritative version of record. It competes with gold road as a flawed path to OA. It creates version-control risks. And it increases the likelihood of indiscriminate use in AI systems.
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