Nobody wants to care about copyright, but everyone has to.

Research is tough. Critical comments from peers, rejections. When accepted, the article only gets published if you sign the license agreement. Re-negotiating is tedious and the agreement is the thing keeping you from publication—maybe even tenure. You sign it without considering the consequences. But the major consequence is that your work is now locked up, which directly affects the impact of your work. Princeton University has even opted to not let researchers handle copyright agreements, because of the consequences.

Caring about research requires caring about copyright

Doing research results in ideas and grows them into answers, but copyright sends those ideas and answers out into the world with all kinds of restrictions. This decreases the value of research. Additionally, it harms the research potential of the next generation. The next Einsteins already exist in Asia, Africa, and South-America, but they are less likely to fulfill their potential because of restrictions in access, sharing, and reuse.

If you want to read research, you already care about copyright

Spreading knowledge is what education is about, and students want to read research (or need to, depending on their motivation). Copyright harms education directly. It harms both developing and developed countries, where restricted access or reuse limits the potential of education throughout all of society. Copyrighting research findings makes it illegal to share the origins of knowledge—which cannot be any researcher's intention when publishing, right?

What can you do?

Check your rights before submitting your work.

Prevent an unagreeable license agreement and check the publisher policy before you submit. Liberate Science inspected license agreements for 31 publishers for you, so you can make an informed decision. Researchers can prevent locking up of knowledge—will you help?

Bought research article? Deposit with us.

Liberate Science aims to build infrastructure to identify and liberate research when the copyright expires. We do not store any data from the depositor, clean all metadata from the file, check when copyright expires, and make sure the research is liberated in due time.

Ensure availability of your work and we will take it from there.

Making your work freely available is easy and helps everyone, including yourself. If you publish knowledge, allow us all to enjoy your hard work. You don't need to pay to be open. We will work on increasing your impact by opening up your knowledge for widespread reuse.

What do we do?

Free access to knowledge is vital to the creation of new knowledge because the old is reused in the new. Reuse is still problematic due to platform dependency, legal uncertainty, limited offering, limited quality, and non-harmonized content. Liberate Science aims to provide content in a legally safe way, free to reuse and build upon, in order to create the building blocks of the next generation of scholarly discovery.

First stop: liberating what can be liberated.