The University of Oxford Open Access Publications Policy, and University Statute XVI which covers intellectual property rights, have now been updated to incorporate rights retention. This re-affirms the University’s preference for the green or self-archiving route to open access.
Read the Open Access Publications Policy
Read the University Statute XVI
From 14 October 2024, by virtue of their employment and without requiring any action on their part, employees at the University provide the rights to make author accepted manuscript versions of their articles and conference proceedings available under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0) at the point of publication.
This has several benefits:
- It allows researchers to reuse their own work without publisher permissions
- It enables funded researchers to comply with funder open access policies
- It enables all research outputs to be eligible for the REF
- It provides an open access route when 'gold' or 'read and publish' routes are not available
- It supports the UK university sector in negotiations with publishers
To utilise rights retention, authors can simply deposit the accepted manuscript of their work to ORA, the University repository, and the repository team will make it available once it has been published.
Authors wishing to opt-out will be able to do so on a work-by-work basis when depositing their papers via Symplectic Elements.
Learn more about rights retention
Learn more about Creative Commons licences
Learn more about depositing your work and Symplectic Elements
Learn more about ORA - Oxford University Research Archive