This three-part post is written by Eddy Verbaan, Head of Library Research Support at Sheffield Hallam University.
Rolling out your own institutional rights retention policy (IRRP) can be a challenge. The work starts with writing a policy, linking it to existing Intellectual Property (IP) and other policies (and employment contracts) and getting the approval from the appropriate governance. This is quite a feat to achieve, but it is only the first step. Once the policy has been written and agreed, you will need to find ways to implement it and to get your academic colleagues on board.
In this blog post I will look at some of the practical issues of implementation that we addressed once we had our IRRP signed off. These include, what data do we need to capture and what workflows do we need to put in place? The decisions we made reflect our journey and our organisational particularities. Because these may be quite different at other institutions, you may end up making different choices.
Creating our rights retention policy
Our IRRP came into force on 15 October, 2022 and was updated on 1 January, 2024. It applies to all journal and conference papers, book chapters, and to students as well as all members of staff. The main thing we are asking our authors to do is to add a rights retention declaration as part of their author accepted manuscript (AAM) submission to the publisher (“For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version of this paper arising from this submission”). This is mandatory because, although we notified as many publishers in advance of our policy as we could, there will always be publishers we haven’t notified yet. And for the rights retention mechanism to work in these cases, inclusion of the declaration is vital.
Our IRRP policy is an opt-out one: it applies to everyone automatically, but authors can opt out if they want to. Our guidance outlines the main reasons for opting out:
- The publisher’s response to a submission with the rights retention statement
- Copyright, when the paper contains third-party materials which cannot be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution licence and the redaction of the third-party materials will compromise the reading of the article. Or when the author has grounds to prefer another Creative Commons licence than CC BY (which may occur especially in the arts and humanities)
- Co-authors want a different licence than CC BY or to follow the publisher’s embargo
Implementation of the policy was straightforward, because our existing IP policies for staff and students already stated that authors grant the university a non-exclusive royalty free right to use their scholarly work for the purpose of assessment and dissemination, including but not limited to the REF. Technically, our existing Open Access (OA) policy defines one of those purposes.
On a general note, it has always struck me that discussions about rights retention in the UK are dominated by research-intensive Russell Group institutions. Yet, all universities that publish research will benefit from rights retention.
Sheffield Hallam is a case in point. We are one of the UK’s largest universities, and more importantly, a teaching-focused institution. Both our teaching and our research focus on ‘knowledge applied’, as is clear from our brand strapline. Indeed, according to our university plan, our research aims to have ‘real world impact, tackling challenges facing society today’. Any institution that claims their research engages with contemporary society will want to give their published work the widest possible dissemination and impact. Although many research-intensive institutions will also claim that their research contributes to society – and so it should –, what I am trying to say is that particularly for applied universities, where the link with society is perhaps more existential, rights retention is integral to their mission.
Now, it is of course true that when a university focuses more on teaching than research, there may be a lack of resources to support an initiative such as rights retention. But perhaps newer teaching-focused universities can be more agile than more complexly structured older universities. In my experience, only a modest number of resources are needed to deploy rights retention. At Sheffield Hallam, the most time-consuming activities were sending out publisher notifications and raising awareness amongst our researcher community.
The next part of this blog post will follow shortly and focus on data.