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Assignment and licence

What does the Taverne amendment entail?

Open Access

Both houses of the Dutch parliament adopted the Taverne amendment in 2015. The amendment was included as Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act: an author of a short scientific work can make this work publicly available after a reasonable period of time, provided that the work is based research that was at least partly financed with government funds. Every author of a scientific work has this right, so you don't need to be a corresponding author or first author to use it. The work can be made available in an institutional repository or on a personal website, for example.

The Taverne amendment is particularly relevant for research universities. However, the exact impact of the amendment was unclear for a long time. In 2019, the association of government-funded research universities Vereniging van Universiteiten (UNL) launched the national project 'You share, we take care'. The alliance of higher education institutions Nationaal Programma Open Science implemented the amendment into practical principles. They state that the final published version of an article, conference contribution or book chapter in a collection can be made freely available to the public 6 months after their first online publication, irrespective of any restrictive guidelines of the publishers. The university medical centres (UMCs) of the Netherlands have now also joined this national project.

Some research universities are taking steps to ensure scientific works are disclosed by default based on the Taverne amendment (opt-out policy). In that case, authors wouldn't have to decide for themselves to make use of the option.

More information

You share, we take care’: information about the national project implementing the Taverne amendment in the Netherlands and about how institutions are supporting researchers in that regard
open access.nl: the open access page for the Netherlands
Nationaal Programma Open Science (NPOS): an alliance of higher education institutions promoting open science