The Library: Rights Retention and Licensing: Rights Retention

What is Rights Retention?

Rights Retention (RR) allows authors to retain the rights to their own work (for example a journal article), rather than transferring the intellectual property (IP) rights (copyrights) to the publisher, as traditionally happens in academic publishing. 
RR supports Open Access by allowing AAMs (Author Accepted Manuscripts) to be made immediately available via our institutional repository.
Making research outputs Open Access (OA) raises the visibility and reusability of research and often ensures they comply with research funder policies.

Wide and immediate dissemination of research outputs without restrictions: research outputs quickly reach a wide audience (including outside academia) and the CC BY licence allows sharing and reuse whilst making sure the author is still credited.
Compliance with funder policies: immediate OA publication, without embargo, is a requirement of many funder policies, including UKRI. RR future proofs the next REF’s anticipated alignment to the UKRI policy.  
Academic freedom and control: RR enables researchers to submit manuscripts for publication to their preferred subscription or hybrid journal, whilst retaining rights over the work and complying with OA requirements. 
Potential to reduce costs and academic inequalities: RR allows research to be made OA regardless of whether an institution can afford subscriptions or APCs. Early career researchers or others who are less likely to be funded for Gold OA, will still benefit from their manuscript being made open in the institutional repository.

The University has introduced RR following an update of the OR Policy and IP policy to support our commitment to Open Research.
Researchers are being asked to assign a RR statement to their AAMs when submitting them for publication. More information on the process is in our step by step guide.
The policy came into force on 1st September 2024
Library Services have notified our most used publishers that LBU authors have assigned this licence, we still recommend you include the Rights Retention Statement in your submissions, but if you have not we can still make your article available because of this prior notification.  
Continue to deposit your outputs in Symplectic exactly as you do now. The library will do the rest.

An author adds a rights retention statement to their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) when submitting to a journal for publication.
The statement outlines that the author has applied a CC BY to the AAM which means that the author retains the rights (keeps the copyright) to their article.
The licence enables the author to grant the University a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide licence to make the AAM of their scholarly article publicly available in the institutional repository.
The RR statement does not prevent the journal publishing the final version of the article, but this prior licence takes precedence over any subsequent licences of copyright.
A CC BY licence allows for the publication to be reused and/or built upon, as long as attribution is given to the creator.
See our step by step guide to the process.

When submitting an article, add the following statement in the funding acknowledgment section of the AAM or on the cover letter: “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.” 
This statement informs the journal’s publisher that the CC BY licence already applies to the AAM and it can therefore be made OA in the institutional repository on publication. This prior licence takes precedence over any subsequent licences of copyright. 
If you’re not able to add a RR statement, read our FAQ on opting out.

Upon acceptance of publication, deposit an electronic copy of the AAM into Symplectic Elements on the date of acceptance.
Authors may also choose to deposit their work in subject repositories relevant to their discipline.
When providing the electronic copy of the AAM, notify the University if any rights or permissions needed to make third party or co‐authored content in an article publicly available under a CC BY licence have not been secured and which consequently need to be made available with a ‘rights reserved’ statement. 
As the non-revokable CC BY license has been asserted before the publishers Copyright Transfer Agreement (CTA), the CC BY license stands even if you sign the CTA.

Library and Student Services will make the deposited copy publicly available via the Leeds Beckett Repository in accordance with the LBU Rights Retention statement.
Metadata is usually available immediately upon deposit and the AAM is made accessible to the public on the date of first online publication (or the conference end date for conference proceedings) under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.