Dive into Rights Retention in our blog.
What is Rights Retention?
The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) is a valuable tool that empowers authors to keep control over the rights to their accepted manuscripts when publishing journal articles, conference papers, and long-form works.
Traditionally, when an author signs a copyright agreement with a publisher, they transfer the rights to their work. This typically gives the publisher control over how the work is distributed and reused. In return, authors are usually granted limited rights, such as using excerpts for other projects or sharing the work in specific contexts, like personal websites.
Rights Retention, however, offers authors the ability to retain rights to their peer-reviewed, accepted manuscripts. This allows them to share and reuse their work freely, including depositing copies into institutional or subject repositories immediately upon publication, without any embargo periods. Furthermore, these works can be shared under open licenses, facilitating broader distribution and reuse. This is known as green open access. To dive deeper into this, check out our recent blog post on the Many Colours of Open Access.
Why Do I Need to Retain My Rights?
Making your research freely available online benefits both you as a researcher and society. Many research funders and the REF (Research Excellence Framework), mandate that research outputs be openly accessible.
When selecting a journal for publication, it's important to evaluate the open-access options available. If an article processing charge (APC) is required, it may be covered through an institutional agreement, paid by your research funder, or you might choose to publish in a diamond open-access journal, where there is no charge for publication.
If you're considering submitting to a hybrid journal (a subscription-based journal with an open access option) but lack the funds for gold open access or are dealing with a journal that doesn't offer open access, the publisher may ask you to transfer most of your rights. In return, they usually allow you to upload the peer-reviewed, unformatted accepted manuscript to your institutional or subject repository, though this will typically come with an embargo period of 6 to 24 months before you can do so.
The same applies to books and chapters. Some research may receive financial support from the funder to publish gold open access, or you might be fortunate enough to be supported by a diamond open access initiative, allowing you to publish without fees. However, if gold or diamond open-access options aren't available, you'll want to make your manuscript openly accessible through the green open-access route.
By retaining the rights to your accepted manuscript, you can deposit it in your repository of choice immediately on publication and apply a Creative Commons licence that sets out the terms of how your article can be shared and reused.
This also allows you to reuse and distribute your own work as you see fit, including for teaching purposes, sharing with your own networks and creating derivative works without needing permission from the publisher.
You can meet funder and REF open-access requirements where applicable.
How Do I Retain My Rights?
It's easy! When you submit an article for publication, let your publisher know that you intend to retain the rights to your accepted manuscript by including the following statement in the acknowledgements section and any cover page or covering letter.
"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."
Insert other licence as appropriate.
When you publish a book or chapter then discuss your requirement to make your accepted manuscript open access through your institutional repository as part of your proposal or submission to your publisher.
How Does My Institution Support Me?
University of Aberdeen implemented the Research Publications Policy in November 2022. The policy supports all staff who have a responsibility for research, including postgraduate researchers, in retaining the rights to their accepted manuscripts, enabling immediate open access under an open licence. The CC BY Creative Commons licence is preferred as it allows maximum sharing and reuse, and is the licence usually mandated by funders, but another licence may be appropriate in some circumstances.
University of Aberdeen notified our most frequently used publishers of the new policy before launch, but we recommend that the Rights Retention Statement is included with all submissions.The Open Research team upload accepted manuscripts to Pure to be made open on publication under a CC BY or other appropriate licence. Whenever they have a paper accepted for publication University of Aberdeen authors should continue to send us a copy of the accepted manuscript.
The Research Publications Policy was extended in November 2024 to include long-form publications. This supports our authors to make a version of their long-form publications openly available. Some funders including UKRI and Wellcome require long-form outputs to be open access either via the gold or diamond or green open access route. Although there is no mandate from REF2029 to make long-form outputs open access it is encouraged and will be a requirement of future REF exercises.
Where Can I Find Out More?
Find out all you need to know about Rights Retention and the University of Aberdeen Research Publications Policy on our webpages and get in touch with the Open Research Team if you have any questions.
