LibGuides: Open Research and Scholarly Publications (NEW): Rights Retention Statements

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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.

Rights Retention Statements

Rights Retention is achieved by including the following Rights Retention (RR) Statement to the submitted version of your manuscript (in the acknowledgements or other appropriate section). This has to be done at the point of submission, as publishers can refuse to allow the statement to be applied retrospectively. From the 1st August 2025, you will be able to retain key rights over your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) published in a journal or conference proceeding, rather than signing them away to the publisher.

Statement examples

Rights Retention Statement: "For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising."

Alternatively, you can include a statement that acknowledges the funding supporting the research output: "This research was funded in whole, or in part, by [insert funder name and grant number]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising."

Some funders suggest specific statements to be use. See below for some examples.

Horizon Europe
"This work was funded by the Εuropean Union under the Horizon Europe grant [grant number]. As set out in the Grant Agreement, beneficiaries must ensure that at the latest at the time of publication, open access is provided via a trusted repository to the published version or the final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication under the latest available version of the Creative Commons Attribution International Public Licence (CC BY) or a licence with equivalent rights."

NIHR
"For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising."

Templeton World
“This research was funded in whole or in part by Templeton World Charity Foundation [Grant number]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC-BY public copyright licence to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.”

UKRI
"For the purpose of open access, the author(s) has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising"

Welcome Trust
“This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [Grant number]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.”