Rights Retention

What is Rights Retention?

Rights retention is a funder initiative from cOAlition S.

Many funders, including UKRI (April 2022), the Wellcome Trust (January 2021), the NIHR (June 2022), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (January 2021) have Plan S aligned policies; which include a rights retention requirement.

Rights retention supports the green, or self-archiving route to open access. It enables researchers to publish a Version of Record with a publisher as well as depositing an author accepted manuscript in a repository, ensuring the widest possible access to research as well as meeting funder requirements.

What do researchers need to do?

Plan S funders typically have the following “routes” to Open Access publishing:

  1. Gold Open Access
    1. Publish in a fully open access journal and pay an APC for immediate gold open access for the version of record.
    2. Publish in a journal that provides gold open access via a Transformative Agreement. Publication costs are paid upfront as part of this deal. No individual APC is paid.
  2. Green Open Access
    1. Publish in a subscription/hybrid journal and use rights retention to apply a CC BY licence to your accepted manuscript, and deposit it in PURE. Your funder may also have an additional required repository for deposit, e.g. the Wellcome Trust requires EuropePMC. No individual APC is paid.

In order to use the Green route, the rights retention route, it is critically important to state on the submitted manuscript that a CC BY licence will be applied to the accepted version (AAM/post-print). It is via this statement which “rights” are “retained” to apply a CC BY licence to the AAM; inclusion of this statement within the submitted manuscript and the covering letter for submission makes it clear at the point of submission what licence you will apply to your author’s accepted manuscript.

If a CC BY licence is not in place for the AAM, then the paper will not be compliant with funder policy. The statement regarding the intention to apply a CC BY licence to the AAM is therefore required on all submitted manuscripts, and should also be included in the covering letter for clarity. An example form for this statement is below:

This research was funded in whole or in part by [FUNDER] [GRANT NUMBER]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) arising from this submission

Once the paper is accepted for publication, the author will need to deposit the accepted manuscript in PURE and any other funder required repositories. Making sure that it is available online, under the stated licence, by the time of publication.

Rights Retention Policy compliments other university policies surrounding Open Research:

For more information visit the Aberystwyth Open Access Webpages, or contact openaccess@aber.ac.uk