New Whitepaper: A Thorny Question In Copyright
We’re very happy to announce the release of the third white paper in our Legal Pathways to Open Access series! […]
The Public Interest Corpus Update – Oakland Edition
The Public Interest Corpus recently completed the last of three planning workshops. The final workshop was hosted at the University
Big Ten Open Books: An Interview with Kate McCready (BTAA) and Charles Watkinson (UM)
Authors Alliance has had a longstanding interest in helping authors see their older books reinvigorated with new life by making them available online for free on an open access basis. One of the most exciting initiatives working on OA for backlist books is the Big Ten Open Books program. This post is based on a set of questions I posed to Kate McCready (Program Director for Open Publishing, Center for Library Programs at the Big Ten Academic Alliance) and Charles Watkinson (Director of University of Michigan Press and Associate University Librarian for Publishing at the University of Michigan) about what the program is and how it works.
Open? When Site Restrictions and Clauses Undermine Open Access
Open access publishing has transformed the way research circulates. In principle, open access means that anyone, anywhere, can read and reuse scholarly work without financial, legal, or technical barriers. But in practice, many works labeled as “open” are quietly constrained by restrictions that limit how they can be used, especially by machines.
Beyond the Exception: Licensing, Access, and the Realities of Text and Data Mining in the US, UK, and Singapore
This is a post by Syn Ong, AI Policy Researcher at Authors Alliance. Authors increasingly rely on text and data mining (TDM) to analyze large corpora across disciplines. Our new working paper, Beyond the Exception: Licensing, Access, and the Realities of Text and Data Mining in the US, UK, and Singapore, finds that formal legal permissions alone do not secure usable access for TDM research. Instead, usable access turns on how statutory rules interact with private licenses, platform architectures, and technological protection measures (TPMs).
Contractual Override: How Private Contracts Undermine the Goals of the Copyright Act for Libraries and Researchers, and What We Can Do About It
We’ve written before about the use of contracts limiting author’s access to fair use, including how publisher contracts restrict innovation
When Your Publisher Isn’t the Dream Partner You Hoped For — What Counts as Material Breach of a Publishing Agreement?
This is a guest post by Hana Khan-Tareen, who is a Legal Research Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center. We appreciate her insight on how authors can best protect their rights.
The Public Interest Corpus Update – NYC Edition
Last month, a diverse set of stakeholders gathered at New York University Law School to contribute to an implementation plan
NO FAKES 2025: Another Bill Sacrificing Authors’ Free Expression for Industry Control
NO FAKES 2025 does not care about actual deception, impersonation, and harm to the average person; instead, it focuses on enabling political censorship and monetization of celebrity likeness.
The NIH Public Access Policy: Implementation and Feedback
The NIH Public Access Policy is in effect as of July 1, 2025. In response, Authors Alliance and SPARC have created a form to collect information about challenges or questions faced by authors, librarians and their institutions in complying with the roll out of new public access policies by federal grant making agencies in compliance with the OSTP directive to make federally funded research freely available to the public immediately upon publication.