A guide to second publication rights

As part of the swissuniversities Regulatory Framework project, the USI Competence Center in Digital Law (CCdigitallaw) has created materials to guide researchers on how to republish their scientific articles to make them freely accessible (open access).

The Regulatory Framework project aimed to propose concrete and feasible solutions to support researchers in securing and safeguarding their rights within an open-access publication context. To this end, the project focused on two main areas. The first concerns the right to second publication, i.e. the right of an author to publish their scientific articles for the second time in another setting, e.g. an institutional archive, a web platform or another journal to reach a wider audience. The second area concerns open access as a regulatory challenge. The project's mandate was exclusively legal. The project results have been recently published as a report on the swissuniversities website.

USI CCdigitallaw has contributed to the project by developing a guide that explains the rights to second publication. The guide covers what the rights consist of, what is already possible to do in Switzerland, after how long it is possible to republish one's scientific articles, and in which version. Additionally, a short video has been produced by CCdigitallaw to explain the right to second publication. All the materials related to this project are available on the CCdigitallaw website under the "Second Publication Right" showcase. (https://www.ccdigitallaw.ch/second-publication-right/). During the project, CCdigitallaw also organised several training activities on the topic in Lugano, Zurich, Lausanne and online.