Rights retention policy: an update after 9 months | Open Scholarship

"2022 has been a big year for open access at the University of Edinburgh. We started the year off with a bang by introducing a revised Research Publications & Copyright policy in January. This mandatory open access policy applies to all University staff members with a responsibility for research. Going forwards all authors automatically grant the University a non‐exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide licence to make manuscripts of their scholarly articles publicly available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

We are proud that the University of Edinburgh was the first institution in the UK to adopt this type of progressive rights retention open access policy, and we are hugely encouraged to see that many other universities are adopting similar policies. In many ways the policy is just the starting point and most of the hard work actually happens afterwards when supporting members of staff with new publishing processes.  This post is intended to give an update of progress so far and to give an account of how the University of Edinburgh policy is having a positive effect on the number of open access publications being immediately available...."