Taverne amendment

What is the Taverne amendment?

Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act (Aw, Auteurswet), also known as the Taverne amendment, grants the author of any short scientific work that is fully or partly financed by Dutch public funds the right to make this work freely available to the public, following ‘a reasonable term’ after its publication. The copyright act is so-called mandatory law and takes precedence over contract law. Therefore article 25fa Aw supersedes any agreement made between the author and the publisher.

Implementing art. 25fa Aw

The Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) and the National Platform Open Science decided to give an extra boost to open access by supporting a broad implementation of this law.

As part of this, the UG decided to introduce the Open access procedural regulations for short academic works by UG staff members , whereby publications by UG authors are automatically made available through the institutional repository (Pure) six months after their first publication in a journal or edited book.

Standard embargo period for all short publications

Due to the new open access procedural regulations, the standard embargo period for all non open access UG/UMCG publications is six months, irrespective of the embargo period imposed by the publisher.

How will the regulations be implemented?

Researchers don’t have to do anything themselves. The University of Groningen Library (UB) and the Medical Library will take care of opening up all qualifying publications via Pure.

The UMCG will follow a similar procedure, see: Medical Library: Library Guide Open Access Publishing: Taverne

For more information on the implementation of art. 25fa Aw at the UG, see: Open access - Taverne (MyUniversity).