Many research funders have adopted a ‘rights retention’ approach to support open access. This aims to ensure researchers retain sufficient reuse rights over their work, to meet open access requirements.
Any researcher can follow this approach, whether or not they receive specific funding.
Despite the growth of the open access movement, a significant amount of publicly-funded research is still only available via publisher paywalls, which limits access to research and slows down the research cycle. Therefore, researchers and their funders have started to look for other ways to open this research to all.
Wherever possible, CCCU signs up for agreements that enable our researchers to publish open access in their journal of choice. Unfortunately, not all publishers offer routes to publishing that are aligned with funder requirements, and some existing agreements are unaffordable.
However, publishers are not automatically entitled to take all rights away from researchers. Researchers have a choice about whether to sign copyright away. Retaining researchers’ rights ensures that their work can be made open access through deposit in a repository on acceptance, without embargo.
“Authors may consider including a rights retention statement when submitting an article for publication. A rights retention statement ensures a Creative Commons (CC BY) licence is applied to your accepted manuscript in the repository, and the manuscript will be made available on the repository without embargo.”
What are the main aims of rights retention for open access?
Maximise the benefits of open research to researchers.
Increase the utility and re-usability of accepted manuscripts.
Simplify researchers’ options and avoids complex ‘policy stack’.
What can universities do?
In line with the Plan SRights Retention Strategy, universities and research institutions can assert a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to deposit their work in Research Space Repository under a CC-BY licence. This allows authors to post the author accepted manuscript (AAM) in institutional or other repositories with no embargo, share it among colleagues, and use it in their own teaching.
What can authors do?
When you submit an article, include the following rights retention statement in your cover letter and acknowledgements:
‘For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.’
Deposit the author accepted manuscript in the Research Space Repository. Provided the rights retention statement is present, this will ensure a Creative Commons (CC BY) licence is applied, and the manuscript will be made available on the repository with zero embargo.
While there is no need to do so, you can make enquiries with publishers before submitting an article containing the rights retention statement. Jisc provides some helpful templates.
Which research outputs and researchers does this apply to?
All articles. Each funder may have slightly different criteria regarding what research is ‘in scope’, however rights retention is broadly designed to support open access to journal and conference articles.
All manuscripts. If your research is funded by one of the below funders, it is recommended to add the rights retention statement to all manuscript submissions, even if the article will eventually be open access via the publisher.
Many research funders have adopted a ‘rights retention’ approach to support open access. This aims to ensure researchers retain sufficient reuse rights to meet open access requirements. Any researcher can follow this approach regardless of specific funding.
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Claire Choong
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