The presentation will explore the Secondary Publication Right (SPR) as a promising legal instrument to remedy the systemic access barriers in the European academic publishing landscape. Despite the European Union’s persistent efforts to foster open science and ensure the accessibility of publicly funded research, existing soft-law strategies and funding conditions have proven insufficient to achieve the intended goals of open, equitable access to scientific outputs across Member States and disciplines.

In response to these persisting challenges, several EU Member States – Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and more recently Bulgaria and Slovenia – have adopted legislative mechanisms to allow academic authors to republish their work via institutional or other not-for-profit repositories. These national SPR regimes vary in their legal framing, however, they universally serve to rebalance power asymmetries between researchers and publishers by providing authors with a legal basis to disseminate their work more openly and independently. The SPR has a dual function – on the one hand, it empowers researchers to legally disseminate their own work, thus enhancing the visibility and citability of publicly funded research; and on the other, it supports broader public access to information and knowledge by promoting non-commercial dissemination beyond traditional publishing channels.

On the other hand, Secondary Publication Obligations (SPOs) impose a legal duty on authors or institutions to deposit research outputs arising from publicly funded projects in open access repositories – typically immediately or soon after initial publication in conventional outlets. Unlike the SPR, which grants a right to self‑archive, an SPO makes self‑archiving mandatory, ensuring broader dissemination of taxpayer‑funded research regardless of the publishing venue or contractual terms with publishers. Countries such as Spain, Germany, Slovenia, and Bulgaria have introduced SPO provisions – in the latest cases, specifically to complement existing or newly introduced SPR regimes, reinforcing the national commitment to open science and knowledge accessibility.

Finally, even though the dual approach – right and obligation – may serve as a legislative model for an EU-wide solution, SPR and SPO alone may not suffice for a systemic reform of open access scholarly publishing. Limitations remain, on the one hand, concerning the full integration of SPR into the EU copyright and data frameworks, and on the other, its practical implementation on the institutional level. The speaker will draw on Bulgaria’s example to discuss the practical implementation of this legal framework in an interdisciplinary way.