Open Research and Scholarly Publications (NEW): Rights Retention

What is Rights Retention?

Rights Retention (RR) is a green route to open access. It enables authors to retain their intellectual ownership rights to a work in order to make the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) immediately Open Access (OA) at the time of publication under a Creative Commons (CC) licence. This allows authors to share their accepted manuscripts under an irrevocable CC BY licence, allowing this version of their work to be used for teaching, research and other purposes without having to seek publisher approval.

Why does the University support this approach?

Adopting a RR approach supports research staff, their co-authors and the University to retain sufficient rights in their publications to use them in their research, teaching, administration, and to share them openly, to maximise impact and comply with funder OA requirements. 

Many research funders expect publicly funded research to be immediately available OA under licence that permits reuse in order to benefit research progress, society and economy. RR was originally implemented by Harvard University in 2008 and then in 2018 by cOAlition S. Their publishing initiative, Plan S, aims to accelerate the transition towards full and immediate OA for all funded research outputs. Signatories of cOAlition S include UKRI, the Wellcome Trust and the World Health Organisation. They all have a requirement that at least the AAM of all peer-reviewed, scholarly works which report original research and are supported in part or in whole by their funding, are published under a CC-BY licence without embargo. 

While REF2029 does not specifically include Rights Retention in their OA policy, they do recommend that institutions fully consider the extent to which authors retain and transfer the copyright of their works. RR enables authors to retain more rights over their work and supports researchers in meeting REF OA policy requirements.

How does it work?

RR is grounded in the contract law principle of prior notice. When an author notifies a publisher at the point of submission that their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) is under a Creative Commons (CC) licence, this assertion takes precedence over any subsequent agreements. A prior CC-BY licence cannot be overridden by a later publishing contract.

Under the Coventry University Group Research Publications and Rights Retention Standard, as well as the staff and student Intellectual Property Policies, authors grant Coventry University a perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide, sub-licensable, non-exclusive licence to copy, publish, and distribute their scholastic works (AAMs) under a CC licence for Open Access (OA) requirements. This licence, granted by the author to the University, supersedes any subsequent contract that a publisher might require the author to sign.

If an author informs a publisher about the prior licence or obligation and the publisher agrees, the publisher cannot later require the author to sign a more restrictive contract. If the publisher does not wish to comply with the prior licence, they have the option to desk reject the submission.

To assist with this, a list of publishers has been compiled using Pure to produce a report detailing the outputs deposited in the last five years, limited to output types in scope of the policy.  The University is currently in the process of notifying publishers about the new Research Publications and Rights Retention Standard, to ensure awareness of a prior licence to an AAM exists with the Coventry University Group. 

Please note that where a scholarly work is intended for publication, authors are required to consult with the Intellectual Property Team before any form of publication or public disclosure, including depositing the work in an open access repository. This consultation must take place to ensure that any necessary IP protection is secured in advance. Failure to do so may result in the loss of potential IP rights and will constitute a breach of confidentiality.

Authors should contact the Intellectual Property Team at IPRKnowledgeExchange@cusltd.co.uk