Rights retention
Information about rights retention and its use at the University of Oxford.
On this page
- What is rights retention?
- Rights retention at Oxford
- What do researchers need to do?
- Funders and rights retention
- Help and guidance
What is rights retention?
Rights retention is an initiative used by increasing numbers of UK universities that supports the self-archiving 'green' route to open access. It allows you to publish in a subscription or 'hybrid' journal and make your manuscript available open access through self-deposit. This ensures the widest possible access to your research as well as meeting funder requirements.
Rights retention at Oxford
Following a pilot in 2023, the University has now incorporated rights retention in its Open Access Publications Policy and in University Statute XVI which covers intellectual property rights. This policy will become operational from 14 October 2024.
Read the open access publications policy
Read the University Statute XVI
This means that, 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. Authors wishing to opt-out will be able to do so on a work-by-work basis when depositing their papers via Symplectic Elements.
How to deposit your papers into Elements
The University has been contacting publishers to notify them of the policy change from August 2024. Please contact us if your publisher is not on this list and you would like us to contact them.
View the list of publishers contacted for rights retention (SSO required)
What do researchers need to do?
Add rights retention statement
When submitting your article or conference proceedings you are advised to add the following statement to your manuscript:
“This research was funded in whole or in part by [Funder] [Grant number]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version arising from this submission.”
This statement applies a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to your manuscript.
After the article is accepted for publication (post peer-review) you should deposit your accepted manuscript into a repository, such as ORA.
Communicating with co-authors
In order to use rights retention, all authors on a paper must agree to apply the CC BY licence to the submitted manuscript. It is the corresponding author's responsibility to ensure that all authors consent to rights retention, but this doesn't require the signing of a separate contract document. In some cases, the copyright in work created by co-authors at other institutions may already be subject to rights retention policies. Where this is not the case agreement between the authors via email (for example) to use rights retention would be sufficient. Suggested email text to send to co-authors:
Dear co-author(s)
The University of Oxford’s Open Access Publications Policy incorporates rights retention. This means that I automatically provide the University with the rights to make the author accepted manuscript (AAM) of my journal articles and conference proceedings available under a Creative Commons (CC BY) 4.0 Licence without embargo.Please see https://openaccess.ox.ac.uk/rights-retention for more information and let me know if you think there is any reason why we cannot make the AAM of our work available on this basis.
Opting Out
If you would like to opt out from applying rights retention to your article or conference proceedings paper, you can do so on a work-by-work basis. A form will be available from 14 October 2024 when the rights retention workflow becomes operational. You should note that opting out may cause your research output to be non-compliant with your funder policy.
Funders and rights retention
The University advises researchers to use rights retention on all your Plan S-funded submissions as a backstop to ensure compliance with your funder's open access policy. Please note that opting out of rights retention may mean that your article is non-compliant.
The funders below all mention rights retention in their open access policies. Please see their funder pages for information on their requirements.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (from January 2021)
