Rights retention - Open Access - Cranfield Libraries at Cranfield University

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Publish with power: Protect your rights with the Rights Retention Strategy

What is Rights Retention?

Author rights retention is a means for researchers and universities to regain “academic sovereignty over the publishing process.” (European University Association Position paper, 2022). Traditional publishing requires the transferal of the original copyright holders’ rights to a publisher and usually means that the authors’ rights to use the article are severely limited. Rights retention enables authors to retain sufficient rights to their own article manuscript, and to reuse their content as they see fit, such as within teaching and their own academic networks, and the ability to add their papers to their institutional repository. 

How are rights retained?

This is done simply by the author telling the publisher they intend to do this when they submit their article. It HAS to be done at this stage, so that the publisher knows before they accept the article. The author claims their rights by inserting a Rights Retention Statement (RRS) into their article, typically in the Acknowledgements section, and in their letter to the publisher. 

The statement required is:

‘For the purposes of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Accepted Author Manuscript version arising from this submission.’

How well do you know your rights as an author? Take the quiz to test your knowledge.

Rights retention development

Rights retention is not new. It was first implemented by Harvard University back in 2008. It gathered pace when a Rights Retention Strategy was championed by cOAlition S as part of the Plan S movement to improve global access to funded research. The Strategy gives researchers supported by a cOAlitionS organisation the freedom to submit manuscripts for publication to their journal of choice, including subscription journals, whilst remaining fully compliant with Plan S aligned policies such as those of UKRI and other funders. 

Rights retention is currently being used by Cranfield authors when publishing their output in journals and conference proceedings via Route 2 (the Green Route to Open Access). This has been necessary since the UKRI introduced their updated Open Access policy from 1 April 2022...."