OA policies & traditional publishing agreements: Status of non-exclusive licenses in Canadian copyright law?

Abstract

To ease the problem of paywall-blocked access to scholarly articles arising from publicly funded research, some universities have adopted a rights-retention OA policy. In this type of policy, faculty grant to the university a blanket non-exclusive license to make the accepted manuscript version of their scholarly articles publicly available in the university's research repository. But what happens if a university adopts an OA policy and faculty subsequently continue to sign publishers' standard publishing agreements that typically require an author to either transfer all copyrights or provide an exclusive license to the publisher? This presentation outlines a project that explores this question within Canadian copyright law.