SCURL Rights Retention Statement
The Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL), in alignment with their aims to collaborate towards the creation of a co-operative library infrastructure in Scotland, and to provide mutual support for members, supports the adoption of Rights Retention Strategies by SCURL HE Institutions. It is anticipated that SCURL HEIs will develop strategy, underpinned by our position, to facilitate the widest possible access to research.
Rights retention can be defined as the practice of authors retaining sufficient intellectual property rights to make their author-accepted manuscripts (AAMs) available without embargo and under an open licence, preferably a Creative Common Attribution (CC BY) licence, through an institutional repository.
Acknowledging that each institution will have different policies and processes in place, our intention is to provide a set of principles which can be adopted by HEIs to enable authors to retain their intellectual property rights and to not, by default, transfer those rights to publishers.
To ensure that the publishing of academic research is both available for public (open) access and fulfils research funder requirements for open publication, SCURL recommends that HEIs take the following principles into consideration when developing and implementing Rights Retention Strategies:
Open research contributes to a healthy research culture, enabling collaboration, transparency and societal benefit. Open access publishing is an essential component of this, and authors should strive towards the widest possible dissemination of their research outputs.
Some research funders, such as the Wellcome Trust and UKRI, require that research published in journals must be made openly available upon publication. This can be achieved either through fully open access journals, journals which form part of a publisher agreement, or through the deposit of the AAM in an institutional repository. A key element of each route is that access should be immediate, without charge, and licensed through a CC-BY licence.
Authors must be encouraged and supported to disseminate their research. To do this they need the support of their institutions to assert their right as an author by applying a CC-BY license at the point of submission for publication, to allow archiving of their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in an institutional repository immediately upon publication, without a publisher defined embargo.
Example 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 from this submission.”
Not all publishers’ terms will align with a Rights Retention Statement, and some may prefer a more restrictive Creative Commons licence. In these instances, institutions should develop processes to identify exceptions and to facilitate publication whilst adhering to the requirements of their funders, and to the principles underpinning Rights Retention. Authors are encouraged to seek advice around the use of third-party material from the applicable person or department in their institution and from their funder(s).
Recognising that authors will wish to publish in the journal of their choice, the adoption of a Rights Retention Strategy is intended to respect that choice, whilst ensuring that any funder conditions on publication are met.