Open Research and Scholarly Publications (NEW): Rights Retention Standard

The revised Research Publications and Rights Retention Standard was approved by the University Academic Board in June 2025 and is effective from the 1st August 2025. The Standard provides the principles to ensure that authors at the University comply with funder and REF Open Access Requirements whilst retaining their rights to their own publications.

The Standard underpins the publication of all journal articles and conference proceedings, regardless of how the output was funded or if it is considered for inclusion in the REF.  The Rights Retention principles do not currently apply to monographs, scholarly editions, textbooks, chapters, edited collections, theses, datasets or other outputs. However, the University strongly encourages researchers to make all outputs as open as possible.  Where a funder requires the retention of rights for long-form publication, this must be strictly adhered to. 

What do I need to do to retain my rights to my AAM?

In order to retain your rights you need to include a Rights Retention (RR) Statement in either the funding / acknowledgement section or the first footnote or endnote of your (co-) authored submitted journal or conference proceedings papers.  You should also include the statement in any cover letter for all your submissions from the 1st August 2025 onwards. Examples of the statement to use can be found on the Rights Retention Statements page.

By including the RR Statement in your submitted manuscript, you will retain the right to disseminate your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) by depositing it in Pure, enabling Open Access from publication under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) Licence v4.0.

Please note that a CC-BY licence v4.0 is the standard default, applied to your AAM via your contract of employment with the University, and the Research Publications & Rights Retention Standard. However, you will still need to notify your publisher that a CC-BY licence has been applied by including an appropriate RR Statement.

Selecting the appropriate Open Access Option for VoRs

When submitting a paper for publication the publisher may ask if the final published paper (sometimes referred to as the Version of Record or VoR) is to be made immediately OA on publication. If you are publishing your paper:

• under one of the University's Read and Publish Agreements, then the output will be made immediately OA on publication.  Please continue to add the output to Pure.
• in an OA journal which does not charge an Article Processing Charge (APC), then the output will be made immediately OA on publication. Please continue to add the output to Pure.
• via the Gold Route, you will have to pay the publisher a fee to enable the final published version (VoR) to be made immediately OA.  You will need to ensure the funds are in place to pay the APC.  You may be eligible for UKRI Block Grant funding or to apply to the University OA fund.  Please be advised that you cannot commit the University to any financial obligations without the appropriate authorisation.
• and opt out of the the University's RR Standard, then you need to ensure that the bibliographic information and appropriate version is uploaded to Pure. Please note that this might mean that the output is not compliant with funder or REF OA policies.

If the above options are not appropriate, you should confirm with your publisher that you do not intend to publish your final paper OA. However, under RR you are still able to upload the AAM to Pure to comply with funder and REF OA requirements. With the adoption of the RR approach on 1st August 2025, the majority of publications covered by the Research Publications and Rights Retention Standard will fall into this category.

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