What is Rights Retention?

Discussions about open access have been ongoing for a number of decades, but a strand of debate that has been gaining greater prominence recently is the topic of rights retention.

Retaining your rights as an author enables you to maintain control over your work, so that you can choose how to share and re-use your work. As the costs of academic publishing rise ever higher, rights retention is becoming an important tool for researchers and their institutions to ensure that research publications remain freely accessible, with all the professional and social benefits open access affords. 

So what do you need to know about rights retention?

Traditional publishing models normally operate on the basis of authors transferring the copyright of their work to the publisher. As a result of this, authors may not be free to use their own work as they wish, for example making papers freely accessible in their institutional repository without an embargo. Rights retention challenges this model as the author retains the right to their work (in the form of the accepted manuscript) by asserting a prior CC-BY licence upon submission which precedes any subsequent agreement with the publisher. As well as affording control, rights retention provides a straightforward route to open access by providing “a single mechanism that enables authors to meet any funder or institutional Open Access policies to which they are subject” (N8 Research Partnership). Many funders support rights retention, with cOAlition S leading the way (including UKRI, European Commission, the Gates Foundation and Wellcome).

Rights retention isn’t a completely new concept in the field of scholarly communications. Harvard University adopted a policy incorporating rights retention in 2008, and the UK Scholarly Communications Licence took inspiration from this and advocated the adoption of a prior licence to help meet funder and REF open access policy requirements. More recently, the push for rights retention strategies has gained momentum with the rising financial crisis within the HE sector. Cuts to university budgets means some transitional/transformative agreements are becoming unaffordable. Many institutions cannot afford the costs associated with open access publishing, whether that is the cost of the ‘big deals’ or the rising price of APCs. In fact, some universities have started leaving big publisher deals and when the time for renegotiation comes at the end of this year, there may be many more. Moving towards green open access via rights retention offers universities a way to publish that is more sustainable and equitable as nobody needs to pay to make their work open access. With no embargo periods to observe, they can meet funder requirements for open access without paying the premium that publishers demand for doing so.  

In the UK there are currently over 50 HE institutions with rights retention policies and that number is growing.

Is there rights retention at Wolverhampton?

Not yet, but discussions on rights retention have begun at the University. If you have any questions, thoughts or comments about rights retention, please contact the Scholarly Communications Team at wire@wlv.ac.uk

Sarah Dar, Scholarly Communications Officer

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