What is Rights Retention and Why Should You Care?

Acknowledgements

Samuel Moore, Ross Mounce, Sally Rumsey, Niamh Tumelty

Slides (CC BY 4.0) https://tinyurl.com/leeds-eglen25.

Quarto Format from Grant McDermott.

My background

• I have been a long-term proponent of open research, sharing code and data relating to research projects. Why should published articles be any different?

• I work in STEM (computational neuroscience) in a maths department (i.e. arXiv friendly). Attitudes vary among scientists; situation likely different in Arts.

• I started researching “rights retention” in the days recovering from first Covid injection, early 2021.

What is rights retention?

Rights retention: author gets to retain rights over their “author accepted manuscript” (not final published version, often termed “version of record”).

Rights retention strategy developed by “coalition S”, a body of funders, who wished articles resulting from projects they funded, to be immediately available under open licence (CC BY).

There are two forms . . .

Rights retention by author

Author can assert their rights by adding following into acknowledgements of their manuscript):

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

Life cycle of a manuscript

Institutional rights retention policy

(Also called “Self-publishing policy”)

An academic institution can impose conditions on their staff/students, e.g. such that the institution has the non-exclusive right to deposit author-accepted manuscripts without embargo into suitable open repositories.

As of Nov 2025, at least 55 UK institutions have insitutional policies.

Why is it important?

1. REF 2029 – papers submitted for ref need to be OA.
2. Funders require OA.
3. Green OA is free of cost, compared to $$$ for Gold OA.
4. Ever tried to re-use your own published figures?
5. Gets you thinking about the importance of copyright on artifacts that you generate, not just papers.

BUT . . .

Not a silver bullet. There is a “golden window” (if you forgive the pun) of opportunity whilst many journals are still hybrid.

Further reading

1. Coalition S position #1

2. My primers #2, #3

3. UK History 2000-2025 #4

4. The Politics of Rights Retention (Sam Moore) #5