Preprint licensing updates

Central to our philosophy at openRxiv is the idea that authors should be in control of the dissemination of their work. Authors retain copyright* of manuscripts posted on bioRxiv or medRxiv, and they can select the license terms under which a paper is shared with readers and other third parties. The license options available include various commonly used Creative Commons licenses, in particular CC BY, a liberal reuse license favored by many open access advocates that requires attribution but does not further restrict reuse.

Numerous funders now encourage or mandate preprinting, and authors can include funding information in preprints using standardized metadata. A number of these funders also require their grantees to apply specific licenses to their preprints, typically CC BY. Many authors are unaware of this, however, and select more restrictive licenses that put them out of compliance with a funder mandate. Previously, the only way to correct this was to submit a new version of the preprint and choose a new license, but we are now introducing a new feature that allows authors to change the license on an existing bioRxiv/medRxiv preprint to bring it into compliance. 

Authors can easily make a license change to a preprint by accessing their Author Area in the bioRxiv/medRxiv submission system (step-by-step instructions are available). Note that it is only possible to select a less restrictive license when making a change, because Creative Commons licenses are immutable (so a more restrictive license could not be applied retrospectively to content previously available under a broader reuse license). Currently the feature is available only for manuscripts posted in the past two years, and it can only be applied to the most recent version of a preprint. We hope the new feature is valuable to authors and saves them time when seeking to comply with funder mandates or update for other reasons.

*In cases where the authors are federal employees, the paper is a work of the US government and copyright free within the US. NIH employees (as opposed to grantees) are therefore directed to place their work in the Public Domain, so bioRxiv and medRxiv have a dedicated CC0 license option authors can select to accomplish this.