Public Domain and Paywalled: Journal Articles Authored or Co-authored by U.S. Government Employees

Academic journal articles authored by U.S. government employees are assumed to be in the public domain, though journals vary in communicating this status, and access is often not provided. To document this situation, between September 2020 and March 2021 we collected and analyzed copyright statements from a random sample of articles in PDF published in 2019 by authors affiliated with two U.S. government agencies. 13% of the sampled articles had a copyright statement indicating the U.S. public domain or U.S. government authorship. 42% of the published versions of the sampled articles were behind a paywall. Even when all authors of an article were U.S. government employees, 29% were labeled in the U.S. public domain, and 66% were behind a paywall. While copyright notices are not required, notice provides legal certainty on the usage of journal articles, which are shared among scholars, added to bibliographic managers, and posted to websites and repositories. Journal articles authored by U.S. government employees may be a source of open access that has not been fully realized, and uniquely, a retrospective source of access for scholarship. We suggest best practices for journal publishers, as well as possible actions by U.S. government agencies, library organizations, and institutional repositories. The U.S. public domain provides an opportunity to increase the number of peer-reviewed journal articles that are open access.