Stand up for your rights! - our new Rights Retention policy

Traditionally the journal publishing process requires the researcher to sign over their copyright © for the article to the journal publisher. This has meant you are no longer free to use the outputs of your research as you choose (in teaching for example). Also, funders (like UKRI) require authors to make Open Access versions of papers available immediately on publication. Potentially this could be a requirement for the next REF although we are still waiting for the full Open Access Policy for REF 2029 to be published.

Why are we doing this at LBU?

This isn’t a new idea. Harvard have been operating a Rights Retention policy since 2008, and the UK Scholarly Communications License has been around since 2016. Plan S funders adopted Rights Retention in 2021 and in April 2023 JISC launched a project to actively encourage all UK HE institutions to adopt their own Rights Retention Strategies.

Policy changes

We have updated the Open Research and Intellectual Property policies to include a Rights Retention commitment.

What do you need to do?

Keep depositing your Author Accepted Manuscripts into Symplectic on acceptance for publication and include a Rights Retention Statement on your manuscript when you submit to the journal for publication:

“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.”

In most cases, we can make your manuscript available in the Repository because we have already written to the 250 publishers where LBU authors have published more than once in the last five years. However, including the statement means that if you are publishing with a publisher we haven’t informed, we are still able to make your manuscript available in the Repository immediately if is published in the journal.

What are the benefits to you?

• Your outputs are compliant with funder and research assessment policies;
• Your work is immediately Open Access, meaning it is readable even where someone does not have access to a subscription to your journal. By sharing the Open Access repository link, you can increase your readership and reach.

My co-authors won’t let me apply Rights Retention. What can I do?

There are very limited reasons for opting out of Rights Retention, and by opting out you may stop your publication from being compliant with funder or REF requirements.

There are three possible reasons for opting out:

1. Co-authors not agreeing with Rights Retention.
2. The article contains a lot of third-party copyright material you do not own the rights to share.
3. In rare cases, a journal may not want to publish if rights retention is applied. Experience from those institutions who’ve been running Rights Retention for some time indicates this seldom occurs.

More information

The Library Open Access webpages have more information on Rights Retention. You can also email us if you have any questions.