What is Rights Retention?

Rights retention refers to the practice of an author retaining certain rights in relation to a copyright work. The vast majority of research outputs will enjoy copyright and in many cases, copyright will sit with the creator (or creators) of the work. (Exceptions may include datasets that are not created through human agency.)

There are, however, situations where the creator may not own the copyright in a work they create and these usually boil down to one of two instances:

• The copyright work was created under an employment contract that states that the work is owned by the employer.
• The author transfers the copyright to someone else.

In scholarly publication, it has become a common practice for publishers to ask authors to transfer at least part of the copyright in a work to them. This can be for understandable reasons, e.g. to make it easier to deal with copyright infringement cases. However, it can also be used to limit what an author can do with the work they originated, such as prohibiting sharing and reuse of the work. This can often work counter to the ideals of open research that are currently championed by research funders and organisations, and can force authors to find money for article processing charges to pay for gold open access as the only resort to meet these ideals and comply with policy.

Use of article processing charges by publishers represent a significant barrier to widescale adoption of immediate open access publication as a default position, as it limits participation to researchers who can find funding, with costs averaging around £2,500. Self-archiving green open access options will often include an embargo period in which the publisher will not allow sharing of the accepted manuscript, and will offer limited licensing options, where any are offered.

Rights retention as a movement is intended to provide greater control for authors over the reuse of their work. With roots in the scholarly communications licence established by Harvard University, it works on the principle that authors grant their institutions a pre-existing, non-exclusive right to reuse the accepted manuscript that results in any publication process and share the manuscript via a repository, usually without embargo and under an appropriate creative commons licence. This frees the author from having to pay costs relating to gold open access, unless they can and want to, which reinforces author freedoms.

Funders like UKRI have started to assert that they want funded researchers to retain their rights in any publications resulting from funded research. As a result, many universities in the UK are implementing rights retention policies. In the majority of cases, they are stating that rights retained are granted to author’s institutions to share accepted manuscripts under CC BY licence immediately upon publication of the relevant research output.

The University of Wolverhampton does not have a rights retention strategy or policy yet, but if you have any queries relating to rights retention and impact on your work, please contact the Scholarly Communications Team.