Not just "released" - works created by federal officers and employees cannot be copyrighted in the first place. But public universities are run by states/territ

Not just "released" - works created by federal officers and employees cannot be copyrighted in the first place. But public universities are run by states/territories/etc., not by the federal government, and there's no such restriction on state governments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_subnational_governments_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_s... Another interesting case: works done by government contractors are eligible for copyright protection, and the copyright can be transferred to the government, which is, I think, how parts of OpenStack can be copyrighted by NASA. By that argument, professors (or anyone else) with government grants should definitely be able to copyright their work and keep copyright. There's certainly an increasingly-popular argument that publicly-funded research work should be publicly accessible / open access, but there's no law or even norm about it yet.