Webinar recording: Rights Retention for Books and Book Chapters, November 23, 2022 | OASPA @ YouTube

Rights retention is gaining traction as a way to achieve open access without having to pay author-facing publication charges, for example by enabling the distribution of manuscripts through institutional repositories.

There are at least two common methods of rights retention – the Harvard approach (first adopted in 2008) and the Plan S approach (first announced in 2020)– practised by institutions or individual authors worldwide. A more recent development is the national implementation of rights retention, such as the 2022 decree in the Republic of Slovenia stipulating that exclusive authors’ rights of publicly funded research can no longer be transferred to publishers.

The focus of such rights retention policies tends to be on articles in scholarly journals. Is there a good reason why we would not consider doing the same for the manuscripts of books or book chapters? Do publishers object more to rights retention for these types of publication than for article manuscripts? Would it not be a good idea to make haste with a more general rights retention policy for books and book chapters now that more and more funders demand open access for other publication types than journal articles?

The webinar was chaired by Sally Rumsey (cOAlition S) and speakers include Lucy Barnes (Open Book Publishers), Per Pippin Aspaas (University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway) and Peter Suber (Harvard University).

Webinar structure (60 minutes)

1. Introduction by chair, Sally Rumsey
2. Panelist presentations 
   1. Peter Suber (Harvard University)
   2. Per Pippin Aspaas (University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway)
   3. Lucy Barnes (Open Book Publishers)
3. Discussion and Q&A