A. Introduction
Open Access (OA), the online, free availability of scholarly research outputs, has become an established expectation in science policy and scholarly discourse. It is seen as necessary to ensure that publicly funded research is as widely and equitably disseminated as possible and so as likely as possible to realise its maximum potential impact. And it can be provided, importantly, in ways that accommodate legitimate copyright interests in scholarly works in the digital environment.Footnote 1 In fact, global policy frameworks, such as UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science, which proposes that governments establish an enabling environment for open access to scientific knowledge.Footnote 2 In the United States (U.S.),Footnote 3 a new White House directive in 2022 (the Nelson Memo) now mandates that federal agencies ensure that publications and data resulting from federally funded research are immediately available to the public by 2025.Footnote 4 In the United Kingdom (UK), open access mandates from research funders have become more stringent—for example, UKRI’s 2023 open access policy mandates immediate deposit in an open access repository with a Creative Commons license.Footnote 5 The next Research Excellence Framework (REF 2028) will include even stricter requirements for open access compliance. These are examples of a global trend towards open access.Footnote 6
In contrast, Australia’s Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) (the Act) and associated policy have lagged. The Act automatically confers copyright protection—exclusive rights of reproduction, communication, and so forth, pursuant to s31—in all original works, including journal articles and other research outputs, regardless of funding source. In practice, academic authors frequently transfer or assign these rights to publishers as a condition of publication. As a result, researchers are often unable to legally share their own publicly funded writings without permission, or fund open access policies apply within the constraints of private publishing contracts.Footnote 7 Australia’s leading funder open access mandates—namely, the National Health and Medical Research Council in 2012 and the Australian Research Council in 2013—were both recently updated to require zero-embargo open access and are only administrative and not subject to statutory force.Footnote 8 There is patchy compliance, especially where a statutory right to open access is lacking. Patchy compliance bleeds across institutions and disciplines, with continuing inequities in access to knowledge and researchers at the mercy of publishers, but with no legal clarity about their rights to make their work open.Footnote 9
Briefly, Australia’s soft-law strategy has not delivered universal open access to taxpayer-funded research. Achieving the ethical imperatives of transparency, accountability, and public value for research investment, this Article argues, will require Australia to embed open access provisions in the Act. Statutory reform would provide the normative weight and force of law necessary to ensure all publicly funded knowledge is equitably discoverable and accessible. At the heart of this Article is a proposal for a three-phase legislative pathway that could bring this about. The proposed pathway—comprising a graduated approach to repository deposit, embargo limits and open licensing—is based on international best practices and is designed to balance the rights and interests of authors, publishers, and the public. As set out below and elaborated in the following sections, the proposed pathway is intended as a pragmatic and incremental reform agenda to bring Australian copyright law into alignment with open access principles while fully respecting Australia’s international treaty obligations. The argument of the Article is that such measured reform is both feasible and long overdue. Taking such steps would place Australia in good company internationally and make the knowledge produced by publicly funded research openly available to everyone.
B. Background: Australia’s Open Access Landscape and Legal Framework
Australia’s open access environment to date has not been framed by legislation but by policy settings.Footnote 10 We have OA policies from research funders—the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council—which require that publications produced because of projects they fund should be deposited in an institutional or subject repository and align with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Strategic Plan 2019–2023.Footnote 11 However, these are policy rather than statutory requirements and therefore must be complied with through goodwill and institutions’ support and resources. As such, compliance with the policies has been uneven. Funders’ requirements are not understood clearly by all researchers, and, importantly, there is no legal clarity or framework to underpin policy.Footnote 12 Publishers’ contract terms and conditions override funders’ open access conditions, and authors must choose which to comply with.Footnote 13 Some universities with research funding and STEM fields have invested in repository infrastructure and staffing to increase compliance with the policies.Footnote 14 Humanities researchers and researchers at regional universities have had less support, compounding existing inequalities in access and discoverability of Australian research.Footnote 15 Public expectations of immediate access to research are increasing—particularly during emergencies such as COVID-19—and the status quo does not provide a path to that goal.Footnote 16
Fundamentally, the problem for systematic OA is doctrinal—it is the Act itself. The Act confers the exclusive rights on the creator and treats any unauthorised exercise of those rights as an infringement. The Act provides a series of exceptions—fair dealing for the purpose of research or study and a limited “flexible dealing” exceptionFootnote 17 —which are too limited to cover the systematic, large-scale dissemination that is required for OA. There is no exception that comfortably authorises authors or institutions to openly archive and disseminate published articles in the absence of a publisher’s permission. The “special case” provision at s200AB confers a right on certain cultural and educational institutions to use works for purposes but is too uncertain and narrow to be relied on as a comprehensive open access right over published research.Footnote 18
A second provisionFootnote 19 confers on the Commonwealth and the States a power to use copyright material “for the services of the Crown” without infringing copyright—and, uniquely, to authorise third parties to do so—subject to subsequent notification and possible remuneration to rights holders. In principle, the examined section could be used to legislate for OA to government-funded research—treatment of dissemination as a service of the Crown—but this has not been tested and would be an indirect and tenuous mechanism for OA reform. As it stands, then, the doctrinal structure of the Act safeguards publisher exclusivity—broad rights and enforceable contracts—and has no express means to displace or limit those rights in the public interest of open access. The result is that authors who transfer their copyright to publishers cannot legally make their work openly available, even if that work is publicly funded. Any lasting solution to Australia’s OA problem will therefore need to engage with the Act itself—either to create new author rights or exceptions to ensure deposit and sharing rights, or to recalibrate the private rights and public access balance by other means.
C. Comparative Legal Models: Statutory Rights vs. Policy Mandates
In formulating reform, Australia is not without guidance from other jurisdictions on an OA approach. In general terms, two models have been adopted internationally: 1) OA rights as part of the statutory copyright framework—traditionally civil law jurisdictions—and 2) policy or “soft law” based OA mandates—predominantly common law countries. Both approaches offer important lessons on the use of legal mechanisms to balance the promotion of OA with the interests of authors and publishers.
I. Legislative Approaches: The Case studies of Germany and the Netherlands
Civil law jurisdictions have been in the forefront in establishing statutory secondary publication rights.Footnote 20 Germany and the Netherlands have introduced statutory open access laws, which give authors an irrevocable legal right to make their publicly funded research openly available in a repository, regardless of the agreements they may have signed with publishers.
1. Germany
According to Article 38(4) of the German Copyright Act the author of a scientific article,Footnote 21 which is based on at least 50% publicly funded research and published in a periodical publication—serial publication, such as a journal appearing at least twice a year—can make the accepted manuscript publicly available twelve months after original publication even if the author granted the publisher an exclusive right.Footnote 22 No contractual provision may waive this right. The law is more restrictive—the open availability must not be for commercial purposes, only the accepted manuscript post-print may be used, and the original publication must be referenced. This German secondary publication right, in effect since 2014, overrides conflicting publisher policies and thus provides legal certainty for authors.Footnote 23 It takes interests into account. Thus, authors can open up their work, society benefits from free access to research results, and publishers’ interests are considered by granting an initial period of exclusivity, up to one year, and by permitting only non-commercial reuse. In this context, the German government linked the legal initiative to negotiations at the sector level (Projekt DEAL) on transformative agreements with publishers and used the law to conclude nationwide OA agreements with the major publishers.Footnote 24 In this way, the experience in Germany has shown that a relatively small amendment to the copyright law can strengthen authors and improve the negotiating position of research institutions.
2. Netherlands
In 2015, the Dutch Copyright Act was amended to insert Article 25fa (the Taverne Amendment)Footnote 25 which grants authors of short-in-length scientific works created in the course of employment at a publicly funded institution the right to self-archive their work after a reasonable time—interpreted as no more than six months—from first publication.Footnote 26 The Dutch provision is much broader because it applies when research has been fully or partly publicly funded—no minimum is set for the funding—and for any shorter-in-size scholarly work, essentially journal articles, no matter the outlet of publication. In contrast to the German law, the Dutch right is not tied to a version or the uses to which it can be made available—that is to say, an author can share the final published PDF if they want to and may also do so under an open licence that allows commercial reuse because the law contains no non-commercial limitation. The sole requirement is that the source of first publication is acknowledged. As in Germany, any contrary agreement, such as a publisher’s exclusive licence, cannot overrule this author right. The Taverne Amendment was closely based on Germany’s Article 38(4) but went one step further.Footnote 27 Its uptake after enactment has been remarkable. Dutch universities implemented the law by coordinated, systematic means—researchers’ accepted manuscripts are automatically deposited in institutional repositories, which then release them after six months. This process is often referred to as “You Share, We Take Care” to emphasise the institutions’ care for the deposit.Footnote 28 The Dutch case thus shows that a statutory green OA mandate, even a mild one, can have a major impact when implemented proactively by institutions; it can also serve as a blueprint for a similar provision’s transposition into Australian law. For example, by amending the Act to give Australian researchers a non-waivable right to archive their publicly funded articles after an appropriate embargo period—say, six or twelve months—regardless of any publisher agreements to the contrary. The Taverne Amendment’s legislative history also provides evidence of the value of political will, as it emerged from parliamentary inquiries and expert consultation that recognised the publishers’ contractual practices were obstructing the dissemination of publicly funded knowledge. It shows that well-focused legal reform, even in a narrow field such as research publications, can have major positive consequences for the openness of the research system.Footnote 29
II. Policy Mandates and The Common Law Perspective: United Kingdom, United States, and Canada
Legislative action on OA has been more difficult in common law jurisdictions, though there has been some success by other means, such as government and funder policy. These “soft law” approaches do not directly create rights in authors under copyright law but use grant conditions and research assessment inducements to influence, persuade, and often require researchers to take open access options. These methods have had some success but are dependent on willing co-operation and can be defeated by publisher-imposed restrictions unless authors take steps to retain rights.
1. United Kingdom
The United Kingdom is one of the leading OA jurisdictions, but it does not have an OA law for research outputs.Footnote 30 Instead, the UK has sought to achieve open access with strong OA mandates from research funders, and through tying OA compliance to research evaluation. From 2014, the UK’s national assessment of research (Research Excellence Framework, REF) that decides how research funding is distributed has mandated that any journal articles submitted for consideration by REF must be deposited in an institutional repository and made open access; longer embargo periods of up to six to twelve months are allowed. In practice, this led universities to set up repository systems and to provide support to academics to deposit accepted manuscripts when they receive notification of acceptance from the publisher, rather than after journal publication. If a given output was not deposited within the allowed period, it was simply not eligible to be considered by REF, which provided a major incentive for compliance. The REF mandate, along with the Research Council (UKRI) funding policy that funds open access, covering APCs for gold OA, among others, led to a major cultural change: in practice, manuscript deposit became the norm at many institutions, and for the most part publishers tolerated the relatively short embargoes, because academics needed REF compliance. There were some compliance problems, particularly early on, but these were seen as attributable to the policy design or awareness issues rather than to any deeper resistance. Over the years, the UK policy has become even more rigors—in particular, UKRI has updated its policy in 2022 to mandate immediate OA for journal articles, either by open licensing of the repository manuscript or by publication in an open access journal; no embargo period is allowed. It is expected that REF 2028 will be fully harmonised with this no-embargo policy. On the one hand, the UK case has shown that administrative mandates can be quite effective in getting a large share of research outputs open, particularly when non-compliance would have consequences—REF ineligibility is a big driver. On the other hand, because these mandates function “in the shadow of copyright,”Footnote 31 it is not altogether surprising that some publisher policies have conflicted with them—for instance, some journals have refused to permit deposit without a long embargo or only under restrictive license terms. UK universities and authors have in some cases negotiated an exception with publishers—a large proportion of the academic output is in fields where publishers need authors to comply with mandates—in some cases drawing on the legal concept of copyright ownership. In particular, several UK universities, including Cambridge and Edinburgh, have taken the approach of creating an institutional policy by which faculty automatically grant the university a prior license to their future research papers when they are created, thereby giving the university the right to post in a repository even where this is nominally “banned” under publisher agreements. Institutional rights retention policies are an approach to an OA mandate where the repository rights are essentially created in advance and have the virtue of being contractually safe. While this approach clearly works, it also illustrates that without a statutory basis, any OA mandate has to contend with the challenge of copyright transfer practices.
2. United States
The U.S., similarly, does not have federal legislation mandating open access to journal articles, but has used agency policies and grant conditions effectively.Footnote 32 The key policy was the Obama-era 2013 OSTP memo directing all agencies with large R&D budgets to require public access to funded research within twelve months of publication in a peer-reviewed outlet. Several agencies like NIH already had requirements—NIH Public Access Policy mandates deposit in PubMed Central within twelve months—and in the ensuing decade essentially all major federal science funders implemented such mandates. Then in 2022 the OSTP issued a new memo phasing out the optional twelve-month embargo: by 2025 agencies must require immediate public access to funded research outputs, with no embargo allowed. This has been accompanied by significant investment in supporting infrastructure. For instance, the Department of Energy’s OSTI.gov and NIH’s PubMed Central provide repository services to host manuscripts. Although the U.S. approach is “soft” in the sense of being policy not incorporated in the Copyright Act, it is forceful because grant funding is conditioned on compliance. The result has been a substantial increase in openly available U.S.-funded papers, and some publishers have responded with changes such as allowing deposit of the accepted manuscript upon publication for federally funded works. One drawback of the policy approach is that it can be subject to administrative change—what one administration mandates another could potentially revoke. Legislation would be more durable. But the U.S. example shows that even without amending copyright law, funder policies can create positive incentives towards OA. The caveat is that authors still need to clear copyright: many rely on publisher policies to permit self-archiving of the accepted manuscript, or sometimes on the legal doctrine of fair use, but there is no general statutory right to deposit. Thus, while US agencies are increasingly requiring no embargo, in practice this generally still requires publishers’ cooperation or authors asserting rights. For example, some authors are now pre-empting publishers by including a Rights Retention Strategy statement in their manuscripts, which applies a CC-BY licence to their funder in advance. In short, the U.S. approach is a powerful example of political will and policy coordination, now pushing to achieve, in effect immediate OA for all federally funded research, without directly trumping publisher copyright—a situation to watch as the 2025 no-embargo requirement comes into effect.
3. Canada
Funders in Canada have also used policy levers.Footnote 33 In 2015, the country’s three main federal research funding agencies introduced a Tri-Agency Open Access Policy. This mandates that researchers receiving grants from the agencies make their peer-reviewed publications OA within twelve months of publication by depositing them in a repository or publishing in an open journal. As with the UK, Canada invested in enabling infrastructure, including the Portage initiative to develop institutional repository services and national services and platforms. Compliance with the policy is based on researchers taking responsibility and institutions helping to make the deposits. The Canadian case highlights the need for co-ordination: without a strong push from a single government level, there would likely be a range of individual policies at university and provincial levels. The Tri-Agency policy created a common national baseline, and Canada has continued work on harmonising repository interoperability standards and training to support the policy. While this approach has been successful, it still relies on the limitations of existing copyright structures—publishers’ embargo policies are respected—subject to the twelve-month limit, and authors need to retain rights to be able to deposit. Canada has not enacted a law for a new author’s secondary publication right, so the policy’s effectiveness relies on grant compliance mechanisms rather than direct legal entitlement. This means its impact is dependent on monitoring, as well as on publishers continuing to permit self-archiving on reasonable terms. So far, that equilibrium has remained, helped by the international tide in favour of OA.
III. Distinguishing Legislative vs. Soft-law Outcomes
The examples help illustrate that jurisdictions with statutory OA provisions—Germany and the Netherlands—transform the default legal position: authors in those countries have a right—enforceable independently of contracts—to make their work open after an embargo. This gives certainty and consistency: every eligible author can rely on the law, and publishers must accommodate it. By contrast, in jurisdictions which rely on soft law—the UK, U.S., and Canada—OA is achieved through incentives and mandates external to copyright law. These can be highly effective, but require continuous adjustment to publisher practices and can fail if they lack the force of law.
As far as Australia is concerned—which, to date, has gone the soft-law route, for example, the AR and NHMRC mandates, the international experience nonetheless offers two main lessons: (1) Unless statutory reform is adopted, a situation where 100% open access can be achieved is probably unattainable due to compliance gaps and publishers’ inconsistent policies; and (2) if legislation is considered, a German or Dutch-inspired approach would be well-advised given that measured, incremental, limited approaches have worked well in both countries and been validated in litigation as consistent with international copyright principles. In fact, in Metall auf Metall, the German Federal Court of Justice expressly confirmed that the German § 38(4) secondary publication right is compatible with EU law,Footnote 34 and in Funke Medien, the CJEU signalled that no fundamental copyright principle stood in the way of granting rights to allow access to information.Footnote 35 The point to emphasise here is that carefully drawn limitations to copyright—even if they interfere with an exclusive right such as communication to the public—can be justifiable by the value of transparency and the public interest in access to information. These cases therefore give confidence that a similar statutory approach would be legally sustainable in Australia, considering international obligations—the Berne and TRIPS three-step test—if appropriately tailored.
In short, then, Australia’s international experience shows that while soft law can go a long way, there is a definite role to be played for a statutory backstop. The potential advantages of a legislative approach have been amply demonstrated. Australia would clearly benefit from a hybrid strategy that enacts a statutory OA provision to secure an underlying author right but also maintains and strengthens policy measures, for example, e.g. requirements linking funding and assessment to open access, to further shift the cultural tide. The following section proposes just such an approach in detail—a Three-Phase Open Access Pathway for building OA into Australian law and practice.
D. A Three-Phase Pathway for Open Access Legislation in Australia
This Article suggests a progressive introduction of OA into Australia’s legal system through a staged approach to ensure effective reform. This “rethinking” approach becomes known as the “Three-Phase Open Access Pathway.” A staged process allows the OA obligations to be progressively added to the Act and other research governance structures, giving researchers and others time to adjust to the changes, and to allow infrastructure to be ramped up. It also allows the gradual change of copyright standards to be as far-reaching as possible while being practical. Requiring everything at once risks making the implementation impossible and attracting unmanageable opposition, while requiring too little at too slow a pace risks not improving access at all.
Three phases is a suitable middle ground that is finely grained enough to focus on the separate elements of OA but also gives a coherent set of reform steps with forward momentum. As already discussed, some or all the logic in three phases is already present in the approaches in Germany, the Netherlands, and the REF policy in the UK, each of which effectively requires repository deposit, an embargo period, and licensing. The following phases build on the aspects of that policy that have already been proven in implementation. First, it is helpful to place the reform in the context of copyright law doctrine. Australian case law has confirmed that the Copyright Act must be able to adapt as societal and technological changes require. The High Court has been guided in interpreting the Act by a “proper balance” between the interests of copyright owners and the interests of users. As discussed in the following sections, three leading Australian cases establish principles that are relevant to arguments for OA.
I. University of New South Wales v. Moorhouse [1975] HCA 26, 133 CLR 1
The Australian case that directly touches on information access was Moorhouse. This concerned a university library which supplied photocopiers that students used to make infringing copies of various works. The High Court held that the university could be liable for “authorising” such infringement if it “had control over the means of copying but did not take reasonable steps to prevent their use for illicit purposes.”Footnote 36 Further, Moorhouse was a case about liability for unauthorised copying, rather than access as such, but the subtext of the case acknowledged the social reality of how access occurs in an educational institution. It did not provide for any general right of the public to access copyrighted works, but did make clear that, where institutions mediate access to works, there is a responsibility to manage that access so as not to enable copyright infringement. Moreover, the Moorhouse case importantly established that a person, or institution, who makes it possible for someone else to use a copyrighted work can be responsible for infringement if they turn a blind eye to that use. This principle has direct application in the digital environment of the internet—indeed, it goes both ways. On the one hand it warns that OA initiatives should respect copyright. On the other hand, it also suggests that where institutions control access to material, ensuring that there is a lawful way to access those articles is a part of the institution’s responsible management to avoid copyright infringement. By creating a legal path for open access, Australian universities and funders would be licensing use in an authorised way. By making access possible in a way that is authorised by law, Australian research institutions would be alleviating the tension in Moorhouse between the demand for access and the reality of copyright restrictions. In short, the case considered underscores the need for clarity as to how far an institution can go to enable access. A statutory OA provision would give that clarity by defining what sharing is lawful.
II. IceTV Pty Ltd v Nine Network Australia Pty Ltd (2009) HCA 14, 239 CLR 458
The examined case concerned a company, IceTV, that published an electronic program guide that used factual television scheduling information to operate its guide.Footnote 37 The High Court used the opportunity to make several clear statements on the basic principles of copyright, and a key one was that copyright protects expression, not facts or information. The Court rejected the “sweat of the brow” approach—which would protect compilations solely because of the effort expended in creating them—and held that copyright should not prevent others from using facts that lack creativity. This aspect of the case concerned has direct relevance to scholarly publishing: a research article will generally contain ideas, data and factual findings, which are not copyrightable, presented in the form of the authors’ expression and analysis, which are copyrightable. The IceTV principle can be said to support the idea that the law should not be used to lock up scientific knowledge and factual discoveries for copyright monopolies. OA takes this further by removing the possibility that the factual content of research, which should be in the public domain of knowledge, is in practice rendered inaccessible due to paywalls. Moreover, the IceTV case reflects the High Court’s opinion that copyright exists to encourage the creation of original works, not to vest in authors or their assignees perpetual control over information.Footnote 38 Requiring authors’ works to be made available after a short embargo period also accords with this: it ensures that the incentive or reward for authors remains—through initial exclusive publication—but ultimately privileges the knowledge, facts and ideas, which should be free for follow-on innovation. In short, this case can be read as a reminder that copyright should not be used to prevent reuse and innovation, and Phase II and III of the proposed pathway—timely access and open licensing—mirror this by limiting the period of exclusivity and mandating the use of licences that allow broad reuse.
III. Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Ltd (2012) HCA 16, 248 CLR 42
The following case was about whether an internet service provider (iiNet) had “authorised” the copyright infringements of its subscribers, who had used a peer-to-peer file sharing system to download and upload copyright works.Footnote 39 The High Court unanimously held that iiNet did not authorise these infringements because it did not have either the ability to prevent the acts or any form of encouragement or sanction for the infringing acts.Footnote 40 The Court did not look at this in a technical way but took a practical, policy-sensitive view based on which by simply providing a service—the internet, a means of committing the acts in question—is not enough to attribute responsibility when the service provider has no direct power over the user’s activity short of cutting off access, and it would not be sensible to impose a duty on intermediaries which would frustrate technological use and public access to the internet. The iiNet decision therefore shows the Court’s clear concern for a workable, realistic approach to copyright enforcement online. Therefore, this case is also relevant to OA practice in two respects. First, it is an example of the judiciary’s hesitancy to interpret copyright to extend to situations where it would unduly burden parties who are not themselves directly involved in infringement. By analogy, iiNet suggests that a legal reform which instead relieves the burden of parties that do want to lawfully disseminate content—authors and universities wanting to share research—would be consistent with a general trajectory of copyright law and enforcement adapting to the digital environment. Second, the case emphasises that “authorisation” is not without limits, a principle which will assist if, for example, universities in an open access regime were concerned that posting articles could somehow expose them to liability to publishers. If the law is explicit in permitting that posting, the issue of universities authorising infringement would not even arise; but iiNet suggests that, even before that, it would be necessary for a plaintiff to show a clear act of encouragement or control over infringing acts, which will not be present when universities are acting under statutory authority to provide access. In sum, iiNet can be seen as complementary to Moorhouse in its approach to the limits of responsibility, which says that without the power and invitation to infringe, there is no authorisation. An OA provision in the copyright regulatory framework would be designed to create a situation where providing access is not infringement at all. Thus, institutions, by following the law, are within the authorised space carved out by statute.
In aggregate, these cases show the capacity of Australian copyright law to balance rights and access interests. The cases do not in themselves establish OA rights, but a permissive context towards shifting copyright standards, as the cases show, that courts are prepared to say that copyright is not to be interpreted or applied in draconian fashion or without regard to technological change and public interest. It is in this legal environment that the Three Phase Open Access Pathway is proposed, with legislative and policy components that would be compatible with Australian law.
E. Justifications for Adopting the Three Phase Open Access Pathway
On the one hand, the phased approach suggested would provide a measured and effective way of legislating for OA to build acceptance and create the necessary infrastructure in the research system while limiting disruptions. On the other hand, more rapid change might trigger opposition and unexpected outcomes, and nochange obviously won’t fix the current system. Below, three phases of change have been identified as a best practice means of targeting different aspects of the OA challenge.
I. Phase I: Repository Deposit (Foundation)
Phase I captures the inputs to OA by mandating timely deposit of research outputs and key metadata in a repository. This foundation phase creates the needed OA infrastructure and culture of compliance, but without rights changes at first.
II. Phase II: Embargo Limits (Timing)
Phase II adds time-sensitive OA into the law by mandating an embargo expiry, after which access to those outputs must be made. The deposit is released to the public after some initial publisher exclusivity.
III. Phase III: Open Licensing (Reuse)
Phase III requires an open licence—for example, CC BY—on the public version of the work, once it is made available. This open licence maximises the openness and impact of the OA output in line with global open science requirements.
These phases present a theoretically elegant and empirically practical structure. With Phase III, the end goal of open access would be met, but by that time authors, research organisations, funders, and publishers would have had time to adapt via Phases I and II. The phases are inter-dependent in a logical progression: no deposit (Phase I) and an embargo expiry would have no effect because the work doesn’t exist in an archive to be opened; no embargo expiry (Phase II) and deposit alone might not necessarily open things up at all—works could still be languishing behind publisher paywalls; and no open licensing (Phase III), and access would be free to read but not free to reuse, which would seriously dampen innovation. It’s also true that three phases of change reflect the existing de facto situation, as observed earlier, in key international markets—deposit, delay, and license—meaning that Australia’s phased implementation can also learn from those precedents.
F. Phase I: Mandatory Repository Deposit
This is the minimum requirement to put in place to achieve OA. Legislation would mandate that every article, or other “publication”, in a scholarly journal, or similar publication, that is produced as part of a publicly funded research project is deposited in an approved OA repository within a short period after the article has been accepted for publication—for example, within three months of acceptance. The deposit would include the manuscript (author’s accepted version) and core metadata (title, authors, funding info, and so forth). This could be achieved by adding a new provision to the Act or related research funding statute, making it a legal requirement on grant recipients, or their employing institution.
Crucially, the first phase does not actually make the manuscript open to the public in any way—it may stay in embargo (closed access) until the terms of Phase II are met. The key outcome of the phase concerned is that the work is in the repository and ready to be made open at some point, and that its existence and metadata are searchable. The logic for this phase is that the requirement to deposit triggers archiving and discoverability of the output and its metadata even before open access comes into play. Early visibility of metadata helps with citations and awareness of the work and the fact that it is to be made open in future. From a compliance perspective, this phase is as easy as it gets. It matches existing ARC/NHMRC policy and mirrors existing practice at many universities—deposit on acceptance, not publication. It’s a minimal burden on publishers because it does not yet require open distribution. Compliance would require universities to set up repository infrastructure and workflows to capture accepted manuscripts from academics. Funders would condition grants on deposit, which most do already, but now with legal force. As part of Phase I, it would be wise also to add an accompanying provision to the Act that carves out this repository deposit from any infringement of copyright or other contractual breach. For example, the law could state that depositing an article in a repository for the purposes of eventual OA, as required by law, does not infringe copyright, such as a specific exception or a statement of non-infringing use. This would trump any publisher contract prohibiting such deposit. In short, Phase I creates a legal right—or duty—to archive in a repository. The UK and other countries’ experiences strongly suggest that compliance can be high if training and streamlined workflows are in place to make it easy, as discussed below. Linking repository deposits to grant reporting and other university systems are powerful strategies. Many Australian universities have already led the way with institutional mandates and “mediated deposit” services for researchers. Phase I could be implemented using existing tools and would immediately begin to build an–albeit temporarily locked–open corpus of Australian research.
G. Phase II: Embargo Limits and Time-Bound Open Access
This phase provides for the guaranteed release of the work to the public after a specified period. In addition—and importantly—it provides for a statutory maximum embargo period, after first publication, that access to the deposited work can be delayed for. Concretely, a law in Phase II would say, for instance, that the accepted manuscript, or perhaps even published version, of a publicly funded research output should be made openly accessible via the repository after a certain embargo period following first publication. The work would then have to be made openly accessible by the repository, which will, at that point, be legally empowered and obliged, to do so.
Such a provision is, in effect, a clone of the German and Dutch secondary publication rights, but it can of course be customized to Australian needs. Exact embargo lengths can be negotiated, but it is a good idea to stay within international ballpark figures—twelve months is the international standard, but some OA advocates, and especially those in fast-paced disciplines, prefer or call for six months or less. Phase II, in short, legislates for a compromise between publisher desires for a certain period of exclusivity and public demands for prompt public access to publicly funded knowledge. The existence of an embargo means that publishers can continue to make their investments back—via subscriptions or fee-for-view models—but that this period is, after all, finite. This also means that if you reduce embargo periods, the pace of innovation will increase, as people can build on research findings more quickly.
The effect of accelerated uptake on innovation has been demonstrated, as has the evidence that earlier openness creates more downstream use and citations. Mention of the IceTV case above is therefore not incidental. By limiting embargoes, Phase II helps unlock facts and data in the short term, even if full text is embargoed, and thus facilitates reuse and new creative works of the sort that were envisioned in IceTV as consistent with information that is not over-protected. Phase II would be implemented via an amendment to the Act that creates a non-waivable right—for the author or, alternatively, directly for their institutions or funders—to make the work available after the embargo. The law would need to explicitly say that any contrary agreement in a publication contract—longer embargo, or complete prohibition of sharing of the work—has no legal effect beyond the embargo period set by the statute. This is the exact wording in the German law and the approach taken by the Dutch law. Australian lawmakers could adapt or copy from those provisions. Embargo periods could even be set in stone in the law itself, but just as likely the Act could empower a Minister or the funding agencies to set and regulate the periods in the future, allowing them to shift, if need be, in the future. Starting out with, for example, twelve months, and eighteen for some fields, would be an interesting idea to signal the reform as moderate.
In fact, because of Phase I, work is already in repositories and thus Phase II effectively just amounts to flipping a switch from “closed” to “open” when the embargo period ends. Repositories, including those with universities, will need to be able to track when embargoes end, which is automatically possible via a repository platform. As an extra measure of comfort, the law for Phase II should state explicitly that making the work openly accessible in this way does not infringe copyright because it is an exercise of a right under the statute. By legislating such, Australia would find itself in the company of Germany and the Netherlands, both of which give authors a guaranteed secondary publication right.
One other question is whether the open access copy should be available under a certain licence at Phase II or whether this is left to Phase III. The proposal in this work is to leave licensing for Phase III and thus in Phase II the work becomes free to read but not necessarily free to reuse widely and commercially, for instance, unless the author so desired and added a license. Such sequencing is one way to allay publisher fears: many publishers are more concerned about commercial reuse—allowed by an open license—than about simple free reading access. So, by pushing the licence requirement back to Phase III, Phase II can be sold to publishers as a less onerous step—again, like the German law, which also disallows commercial reuse in the self-archived version. Australia could add the non-commercial limitation or not. On the one hand, if the policy aim is international alignment with “open” norms, then you would want to exclude a non-commercial restriction, such that the law would permit truly open access to the work in the repository. On the other hand, if it is a transitional compromise Australia is after, then Australia could start by banning commercial use of the Phase II manuscript—effectively thus making it free access but not “open”—to allay publisher fears and then have Phase III lift that restriction. Such detail is a matter of policy preference and legislative design where stakeholders can be asked. In any case, Phase II ensures that no publicly funded article will be kept permanently behind a paywall, which is a significant step in policy terms alone.
H. Phase III: Mandatory Open Licensing
This phase will help maximise reuse and impact of research. The final phase would say that when the work is made open, after the embargo, it must be made available under an open licence that permits broad reuse. The archetypal license is the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license, which allows anyone to share and adapt the work for any purpose, so long as the original author is credited. Phase III would legalise that the repository copy of the work—released pursuant to Phase II—must be accompanied by a licence or legal status that authorises reuse by users.
The logic is that true “open science” is not achieved by just free availability; for maximum impact, it is when others can text-mine the research, translate it, reuse figures into new work, use the data for meta-analyses, and so forth, and all of these things require permission or assumption of implied permission in the absence of notice to the contrary unless a license is attached. Mandating a liberal licence—CC-BY or equivalent—is how one ensures that research outputs are really integrated into the open knowledge commons, greatly magnifying their value. This is also the strong international consensus on open science policy: Plan S requires the use of CC-BY licensing for funded research outputs. Similarly, UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science emphasises the importance of open licensing frameworks. Increasingly, the global scholarly community also recognises CC-BY as the preferred licensing standard for open access publications. Some funders, such as the medical research funders, also emphasise that open licences are what allow downstream creation of educational and translational materials from the research.
To implement Phase III, it would be a question of changing the Act to say that after the embargo, the author, or designated other entity, such as the author’s institution, has the right to distribute the work under a specified open license regardless of any publisher transfer of rights. It would be effectively an author’s reversion right or license right that comes into force at the embargo’s end. The other option is to have the law itself say that the act of making the work available after embargo shall be taken to be made under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. This would give legal certainty that users of the work would get rights to reuse. There is some complexity, as under Australian copyright law, moral rights, including attribution, need to be respected and cannot be waived completely. This is not in conflict with CC-BY because CC BY requires attribution; it just allows redistribution with attribution, but the law itself needs to make sure any open license also comports with moral rights, perhaps by mandating attribution as a default. Publishers will object to this phase the most because it has the greatest potential impact on their business models, effectively allowing anyone, including commercial parties, to reuse content, which could erode some kinds of revenue streams. However, by Phase III publishers would also have had time to adjust to the existence of Phase II, and the big change from Phase II to III is essentially just a CC-BY license, which mainly permits commercial and derivative uses. Publishers have already trialled and adopted open access models where CC-BY is the norm, for example, under transformative agreements or in fully OA journals. The legislation itself could moderate opposition by phasing in the operation of Phase III to come into force after some further delay, allowing publishers to make further adjustments to their business models—for example, focusing on services-oriented offerings, or other value-added content that doesn’t infringe the license.
The reference in the Phase III implementation wording to publishers and funders working together on licence harmonisation also implies one would engage with stakeholders to make this transition as smooth as possible—for example, certain types of content, like images or third-party material in an article, could be carved out or carefully treated under CC-BY to avoid these legal thorns. But the key point is that Phase III is what makes OA open—by making it legally clear that all the downstream reuses that drive innovation and impact are possible—text and data mining, educational reuse, and so forth. It is what finalises the policy pathway by making the publicly funded knowledge not just free to read but free to reuse, thereby maximising its value to society.
It should be observed that this legislative pathway would need to be underpinned by complementary policy and infrastructure levers if it was to succeed. The amendment of the Act is not a panacea; its success is dependent on how it is used by stakeholders. The following section canvasses some of those practical considerations.
I. Stakeholder Impact and Feasibility Considerations
Implementation of OA through legal reform will affect various stakeholders in the research and publishing system. However, these impacts are both manageable and positive based on Australian and international experience. This section discusses the pathway’s key stakeholders—researchers, institutions, publishers, funders, and the public—and addresses the practical and political considerations to highlight practices that will ensure the pathway’s feasibility.
I. Researchers (Authors)
The major beneficiaries of OA are often the authors, as open access increases the readership and potential impact of one’s work. The literature on this point is long and consistent: open articles have more reads and citations than those behind paywalls. Compliance with the pathway would primarily impact researchers in the sense that they would be responsible for depositing their manuscript but these activities, especially if supported by university library staff, represent relatively light add-ons to one’s workload. In any case, Australian researchers already accustomed to working under the REF or other mandates have shown it is possible to internalise such practices to the point where they become second nature.
Australian researchers working temporarily in the UK, for example, had no trouble depositing manuscripts immediately upon acceptance in their repositories because that step was an easy add-on to their workflow, and several of the UK’s institutional repositories link deposit with other aspects of university business—for example, performance reporting or scholarship management—to make it as seamless for academics as possible. Cambridge and others also assist with automating embargo management—for instance, lifting the access restriction after X months—and advising on licenses and copyright retention. At the University of Melbourne, a pilot program integrated a repository deposit form into the university’s workflows for researchers and provided plain-language guidance for researchers about their self-archiving rights under the publisher’s agreement.Footnote 41
In each case, it appears that, with institutional support, researchers can adjust to open access mandates. Many, if not most, researchers will also come to appreciate that their work can be more widely read, and their research more visibly cited under open access. Phase I and II of the proposed pathways require no action from researchers beyond what many already perform, such as uploading a manuscript to a system when prompted. Phase III would add the small matter of selecting a licence, for which some authors may raise concern about others reusing their work in unintended ways. But education on what licenses allow—and do not allow—can assuage such concerns: a CC-BY license, for example, still obliges others to attribute the author and does not allow plagiarism of their work, and empirical evidence from other countries suggests that the theoretical downsides of reuse are outweighed by the positive benefits of reuse. In short, the open access pathway would align with researchers’ interests and values to enhance their impact and to have publicly funded work used for the public good.
II. Research Institutions (Universities)
Universities will be important actors to ensure the pathway works in practice: their repositories will house the research outputs, and they will support their academics with deposit, compliance monitoring, and possibly negotiation with publishers or copyright guidance. Fortunately, Australian universities are well-equipped to do so, seeing as most have institutional repositories, many already have open access policies, and they have library and research office expertise that can be built on. A legal mandate would see most universities expanding their repository teams and university outreach to researchers.
The Netherlands’ experience with the Taverne Amendment provides one example of universities’ role in effective system design. In the Netherlands, many universities took a proactive role in complying with the Taverne Amendment by automatically depositing faculty publications that met the criteria and releasing them at six months, even without a request from a researcher. This “auto-deposit” system, set up and run by library staff in many universities, greatly facilitated compliance while minimising the burden on academics.Footnote 42
Australian universities could adopt auto-deposit approaches themselves, possibly integrating their institutional repositories with research management systems to identify publications from funded research projects and capture them. In Germany, some institutions set up dedicated “Open Access offices” to help researchers understand and exercise their rights under s38(4) as well as to handle negotiations with publishers.Footnote 43 An Australian implementation of the legislative changes would see each university’s library or research office playing this coordinating role, making sure that every publicly funded paper is duly deposited and released at the correct time and that a liaison is available if any issues come up with a publisher. Australian leaders such as QUT have also shown it is possible to provide mediated deposit services and get high rates of repository deposit even without national legislation. The overall picture is thus that, to the extent open access shifts the system in line with ethical commitments to making publicly funded knowledge available, research institutions also stand to gain because open access will improve their research visibility, and it can be a source of pride and competitive advantage.
While there will be costs associated with making this system work, these are not out of scale with overall research budgets, could be partly offset with potential reductions in library subscription expenditures over time, and would be justified by the additional benefits to Australia’s universities. In any case, the government could assist by providing transition funds or seed funding for repository infrastructure. The phased nature of the pathway also helps institutions scale up capacity.
III. Publishers
Publishers are a stakeholder with legitimate interests which need to be considered. Academic publishers, both commercial and society-based, have until recently made most of their revenue from subscription or license fees. Open access changes that model, though, as the experience in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, and other countries has shown, publishers have proven quite capable of adapting to this change and can be partners in open access. Indeed, many large publishers have their own hybrid or full open access options and, in some cases, have been experimenting proactively with open models that have no fees to either readers or authors—Diamond OA.
The reform pathway in effect would require publishers to allow green open access to all research after a fixed period, which many publishers’ journals already permit anyway as part of the journal contract. Publishers may push back against the change to a degree, but the international evidence and the fact that Australian academic publishing market share is small in the global context suggest it is unlikely that they would exit the market entirely in response to such reforms. A phased approach would give them a transition period as well, though of course, the trade-off for this is their lost subscriptions from the embargo period. Publishers would likely need to up-level their own green open access policies, especially regarding embargo length, which several publishers already reduce under contract, and systems for receiving and processing green OA requests.
For Phase II and Phase III, publishers will likely be actively investigating and negotiating sustainable open access business models, something many are already doing. Phase I of the pathway has no impact on publishers—deposit is closed. Phase II requires a shortening of the embargo to a standard length, which publishers who currently demand no embargo or very short embargoes—such as six months—would need to adapt to. The law could accommodate this, at least initially, by setting the embargo at eighteen months for HASS. Phase III, as mentioned above, is the biggest change to publishers’ business, but by the time it rolls around, all the expectations about open content will be more normalised—especially if global policies like Plan S and OSTP have greater global take-up. In any case, if publishers have a gold open access option that authors are willing to pay for, those journals and publishers will still get APC revenue.
For many publishers, there would be upsides to green open access.Footnote 44 As noted earlier, one of the fears about green open access is that it cannibalises sales and subscriptions. But when gold open access is the main option, publishers have at least some incentives to promote reading—marketing—and green OA does not cause this same conflict of interest. Green OA and gold open access models are not mutually exclusive, and green has clear benefits in terms of making a version of the record openly available in the interim. Most publishers are also highly conservative, preferring subscription income and the status quo over a riskier open access model which is not as lucrative yet. Thus, they may be hesitant to embrace full open access of their own accord, but it is not impossible, and by the time Phase III comes into effect, it is likely that other markets—such as Plan S countries—will be pressuring the publishers even more. So long as the reforms do not ban any business models, publishers can see benefits: open access would give their articles greater visibility and possible citation impact because everyone will have a guaranteed green copy after one year, and the value-added features of publishers’ platforms—peer review, formatting, statistics, and so forth—become all the more attractive for libraries to pay.
Overall, the challenges for publishers would seem to be manageable. Clear messaging and a lead-in time before enforcement would go a long way to ensure publishers could adjust with minimal difficulties. As with the other stakeholders, much of the international experience has been that the reforms have not led to the end of publishing, just an evolution with most publishers remaining in business and continuing to collaborate on open access where it is implemented at the system level.
IV. Funding Agencies and Government
Government agencies such as the ARC and NHMRC have an oversight and enabling role, which should be relatively straightforward: simply updating their grant conditions to state that compliance with the above law is a condition of all grants awarded and investing in compliance monitoring tools where necessary. Canadian Tri-Agency and the US NIH’s NCBI systems—linking grants to publications—provide examples of funders with reporting systems to track publication and compliance.
Australian funders could build on existing systems—ARC’s Research Management System, use ORCID and institutional repositories to pull data—or even develop systems to work in the background and capture data on publication that would be easily imported into reporting dashboards or publication system interfaces. They might also provide funds or support for publication fees for open access publication where needed. However, the pathway in this policy proposal focuses on green open access which, depending on the discipline, does not require payment of such fees. The government would have the role of making the legislative changes: the reforms would need to be sponsored and driven through parliament by the executive government.
Fortunately, this aligns with the government’s other commitments to open government, transparency, and digitisation. The Australian Chief Scientist, Dr. Foley,Footnote 45 and other leadersFootnote 46 in the past few years have publicly expressed support for open science principles and frameworks, pointing out that open science can improve innovation, trust and value for taxpayer dollars. The Business Council of Australia (BCA) has also publicly recognised the need for transparency and better return on investment from R&D and the open access and open research principles directly support that goal. We therefore see that policy advice has been coalescing around this direction for some time. Of course, in practice the government will need to work across portfolios, such as education and science, and likely allocate modest funding for repository infrastructure on a national level—potentially expanding the Trove system or other national repository platform to aggregate open content.
V. The Public
The final beneficiaries of the change to open access are the public and specific user groups: industry, clinicians, educators, public policymakers, and the like. There are clear reasons that free public access should be the default. The value of this for users outside the academy has been demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when publishers, national agencies (Wellcome Trust), and international organisations (WHO) took a page from the UK law and temporarily made COVID-related research free for all. This is effectively what the proposed pathway would put in place for all research outputs, across all fields. Journalists, for example, can more readily write stories on new research, leading to better public discourse. Teachers can include new findings in their teaching materials or curricula, and industry start-ups without big library subscriptions can more readily access the latest research to build on, translating scientific research into commercial applications, patents, and faster, more innovative products. We know from both philosophy and practice that the public has a right to read the research they paid for through taxes, as a principle of justice. This can also be framed as a public right to access publicly funded research, which is an ethos the pathway embodies.
But there is also a democratic element, as the Dutch experience suggested; open access also has positive impacts on public trust in science and the public’s willingness to engage with it because they can read the evidence behind policies or recommendations. Whenever the question is asked or polling is conducted, public support for open access is consistently strong. The pathway is in that sense also a win for the public interest, realigning copyright law with its original rationale and intent as the engine of dissemination and knowledge expansion for the public good.
Considering the above stakeholder analysis, most feasibility concerns are in fact addressable with a phased implementation that allows lead-in times and engagement and allows for evaluation. The Netherlands, Germany, UK, and international experience can be used as a toolkit. Automatic repository deposit and integration into researcher workflows can deal with compliance. Pairing legal mandates with good institutional support led to significant success rates.Footnote 47 Good communication with a lead-in time on the changes will ensure stakeholders understand and are willing to come on board with them, rather than fear change or feel blindsided. Phasing also means that by the time full open access is in place, all intermediary steps from culture change around deposit to automatic embargo release systems are already in place. Each phase can be implemented and evaluated to allow refinement or fine-tuning if needed, and the incremental nature of the pathway also provides cover. Furthermore, early successes in Phases I and II can be used to build momentum before Phase III. All in all, the impacts on stakeholders appear both positive or addressable to be so. Experience of implementing OA through legislation elsewhere shows that none of the stakeholder challenges are deal-breaking, and indeed in many cases, the stakeholders in question are waiting for or are already enacting such a system. Australian policymakers and institutions could be confident in and pragmatic about designing a pathway that is both realistic, efficient, and mutually beneficial to all the stakeholders involved.
J. Historical Foundations and the Road Ahead: Primary Findings
The recommended pathway is not new, nor even particularly novel. It is in fact the logical, if long overdue, conclusion of a policy process that Australia has been on, in fits and starts, for some time. There is a long series of reports, submissions and advocacy by various levels of government and expert advisors that have built up the foundation of this kind of change, from very different directions but all emphasising the need for open access in various ways.
Recent recommendations addressed by the Business Council of Australia have long emphasised the need to see a better return on public investment in R&D—money, talent, and infrastructure—with a greater focus on transparency and driving innovation-led productivity. OA directly helps meet these goals by making it easier to get knowledge into the hands of those who can use it—industry and society more broadly—and as a result, use it to drive innovation and create new products and jobs in the knowledge economy. A small legal change, such as Article 25fa in the Netherlands as previously considered, has the potential to unlock the culture, which is all it takes.
Calls for a stronger commitment to open science from Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr Cathy Foley, and other leaders in the space—Professor Duncan Ivison and Honorable Peter Garrett, among others—in recent years have made similar points. The undersigned author has also emphasised elsewhere how central these calls are to Australia’s research future: our place as a leading international research destination and the public’s trust in the value of that research both depend on this transition to open research. It would fit well with the strong tradition of public law in Australia of bringing statutes into line with current values and expectations the same way that previous Australian legal reforms have been necessary to update the law for its time.
The law can be reasonably determined as a “living entity“. It grows up. It progresses and evolves, and if its development is challenged, then its “parents” (drafters) should be there to support, to "feed", and to help it follow a proper way or “restitution.” Just as Australian courts and lawmakers, who incrementally came around to updating the principles of how we think about copyright to fit a new social and technological reality in cases from Moorhouse through to iiNet, in laws like the flexible dealing exception, so too must the copyright regime be updated to make sense for this new reality—the digital, data-driven world of research and knowledge production that is the reality of research today.
The two decades of Australian experience with institutional and funder mandates—ARC, NHMRC, and all the universities—have given us a significant head start in terms of evidence and confidence that OA is both desirable and wanted, at least when it is well designed and well implemented. We have several places in the country where OA rates are demonstrably very high and open policies appear to be working, as well as other places where OA rates have stagnated and where we have learned a lot about what does not work, such as voluntary or policy-only approaches. Taken together, that body of knowledge teaches us that the next logical step of introducing legislation is not a giant jump into the unknown but rather an incremental next step based on tested ideas. It is also fully aligned with international best practice and would put Australia in step with international trends.
As such, the next ten or twenty years—assuming Australia chooses to implement the three-phase pathway above—will see Australia join this small but growing coalition of other countries with similar legal reforms, working in an international common interest of democratising access to knowledge. A reform of this kind would help to make sure that Australia’s copyright law once again works to the public benefit, in keeping with the original spirit of copyright as a bargain to disseminate knowledge and reward innovation for the good of society. By lifting the remaining barriers to access between the public and the research that they fund, Australia can expect to see the full range of positive outcomes flow: from better use of research in policy to more innovation in industry, especially smaller companies better able to leverage publicly funded research, to better education and cultural development as knowledge flows more easily. And it will also help to amplify the impact of Australian research around the world, as the findings of Australian labs become much more accessible to everyone, from the next-door neighbour to the next-door nation, inviting new international collaborations and citations.
As much as any reform, this is a change in trajectory rather than a change of destination. It continues the steady course Australia has been on for the last two decades, but with renewed determination and clearer direction. By showing strong and decisive political will to resolve a longstanding issue in a clear direction based on the evidence of what works and a genuine interest in the needs of authors, publishers, and the wider public, this reform will signal the next chapter of Australia’s engagement with open access to knowledge. This is the time, and the momentum is with us.
Supplementary material
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2026.10223
Acknowledgements
I would like to specially thank my wife, Antigoni, and my son, Evangelos, who both are always there for me towards the completion of challenging research projects such as the one concerned.
Competing Interests
The author declares none.
Funding Statement
No specific funding has been declared in relation to this Article.
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