ARL Welcomes cOAlitionS Rights Retention Strategy Calling for Open Access to Results of Funded Research - Association of Research Libraries

"The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) commends cOAlitionS on today’s announcement of its Rights Retention Strategy to advance the goal of immediate open access to the published results of funded research. With this announcement, cOAlitionS has provided a pathway to implementing the first principle of PlanS, that authors or their institutions retain copyright to their publications, and make them available under an open license. While author rights retention and open licensing have been a bedrock principle for open access advocates for nearly two decades, many authors are reluctant to challenge journal publishers who require the transfer of copyright as a condition of publication. Similarly, cOAlitionS (and many other funding agencies) have been reluctant to tell authors where to publish their work. Under this new strategy, cOAlitionS resolves this conflict by assigning, as a condition of their grants, a default CC-BY license to all Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) reporting on original research supported in whole or in part by their funding. Grantees are asked to inform publishers of this requirement and open license upon submission, and then upon publication to make that manuscript (or, if possible, the Version of Record), immediately available in an open access repository. Research libraries either maintain such open repositories for their institutions or have the expertise and services to consult with researchers on where and how to deposit their work openly...."