Although researchers automatically hold the copyright in their own work, it is common practice amongst publishers to ask researchers to give all or part of the copyright over to them when they sign a publishing agreement or Copyright Transfer Agreement.
This often means that although you are the originator of the work, you have to apply for written permission from the publisher to share or re-use your own work. Publishers also place restrictions on how you can share the author accepted manuscript (AAM). The type of restriction varies from publisher to publisher but in many cases, if you want to post your AAM in an institutional repository, you can only do so if the work is embargoed.
Rights Retention works by ensuring that authors retain the rights to the AAM, meaning they have the authority to licence the AAM as they see fit, usually applying a CC BY licence, and can post a copy in an institutional repository or any academic networking site immediately.
Rights Retention is achieved by including a short Rights Retention statement to the submitted version of your work. This has to be done at the point of submission as publishers can refuse to allow the statement to be applied retrospectively.
Funders such as UKRI and Wellcome Trust have set statements that should be used.
Publishers have the right to reject a submission if it includes a Rights Retention statement, however in practice this is unlikely to happen given the work that many funders have done to impress on publishers the need for this change.
You may need to consider rights retention as a route to achieving open access if the following applies:
OR
You do not have access to a publishing agreement or other funding which will cover the cost to publish your work Gold open access
Birmingham Newman University's open access policy does not require you apply a rights retention statement to your work.
If you need help understanding when to apply rights retention to your work, e-mail openaccess@newman.ac.uk.
Last reviewed: 28 May 2024
