LibGuides: Open Research and Scholarly Publications (NEW): Encountering Publisher Pushback

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This guide provides information about the Coventry University Group approach to Rights Retention. It is aimed at all employees, students and visiting researchers of Coventry University Group who are intending to publish the results of their research (particularly as a journal article) and who will be identified as the corresponding or lead author of the output.

Rights Retention is easy to achieve by the inclusion of a statement in your submitted manuscript to a publisher.

Encountering Publisher Pushback

At Coventry University the Green Route (self archiving in an institutional or subject repository) is an essential route to achieve Open Access (OA) and meet funder requirements for OA. Publishers have no right to dictate which OA route you choose. Any publisher statement which claims that you must choose the Gold Route in order to comply with a funder requirement for Rights Retention (RR) is incorrect.

Coventry University has written to over 400 publishers to inform them of the adoption of the Research Publications and Rights Retention Standard and requirements for Coventry University authors. These requirements come prior to any contract presented by the publisher.

Publishers are aware of RR, the institutions who have policies in place, and the requirements of a number of research funders for rights retention. They should not be asking you to sign over copyright to the AAM of articles that contain RR language. If you are asked to sign over copyright to the publisher, you do not have to do this. Please contact rightsretention@coventry.ac.uk regarding this.

As the University has notified a wide range of publishers, you will still be able to make the AAM immediately available in Pure, regardless of what the publisher attempts to do/say regarding the OA sharing and dissemination of your AAM.