This is a guest post by Liesl Rowe, Senior Digital Library Advisor (Copyright), Library and Learning Services, Leeds Beckett University
On 1 September 2024, Leeds Beckett University (LBU) formally introduced a new rights retention policy. This was the culmination of a year’s work. The project began in December 2022 with the appointment of our new Pro Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation, Silke Machold.
We rewrote our Open Research and Intellectual Property (IP) policies, integrating rights retention language into both existing policies. We wanted the feeling of rights retention being an integral part of our research provision so incorporation felt more true to those aims than keeping it separate in its own policy. Next, we used Scopus and Open Alex to work out where our academics have published in the last five years, creating a list of publishers to contact. Each publisher was sent a letter from Silke and the head of LBU library at the time, Jo Norry. The letter informed them that we were introducing rights retention and that any articles submitted after our policy start date were eligible for the policy[1].
We have benefited a great deal from being in the middle of the pack in terms of universities introducing rights retention. This has allowed us to benchmark our own operating policies against other institutions. For instance, we initially had a submission date of 1 September 2024 onwards as our policy starting point as we gave publishers around a month between notification and the start date. As we received little feedback from publishers, similar to others in the sector, we have now moved to include anything published on or after 1 March 2025. At the moment, relatively low numbers of articles have been made available under the new rights retention policy as many outputs are using our existing Transitional Agreements to make their work Open Access. However, we expect this number might grow as academics become more aware of the policy and its benefits.
For us, introducing rights retention was an institutional necessity and a high priority for Silke due to the new REF 2029 Open Access policy: articles will only be counted if they were published under a CC BY license and with a shorter embargo period than many journals allow. This thinking seems to have driven most institutions looking to adopt a rights retention strategy: Ami Pendergrass’s literature review analysis of rights retention policies shows that the REF and research funding requirements were by far the most cited reason for adopting rights retention institutionally[2].
From a publisher perspective, rights retention poses a challenge to their existing work processes. We, as many other institutions did, expected backlash. This has included:
- Refusal to accept our prior notification as a blanket declaration and an expectation that we will inform them every time we submit something which falls under rights retention.
- A publisher stating that papers with rights retention language won’t be rejected. However, no author manuscripts may be placed under a Creative Commons license, according to the terms of their journal policies. Any authors who wish to do so can only publish under the immediate gold open access route. Authors are asked to agree to this when signing their standard subscription licensing terms.
- Another publisher asks authors to agree, as part of their author contract, that their publishing terms take precedence over any other terms authors assert during the publishing process. Authors must also sign that they haven’t assigned rights to any other third party for the article or content that will conflict with rights granted in the publishing terms.
- One publisher has gone even further: due to the widespread adoption of rights retention in the UK, they now require all papers authored by someone from a UK institution to be published open access.
Reviewing the publishers’ pushback, most of it has been addressed to authors directly rather than to LBU library as an institution. None of these publishers have gone as far as a legal challenge to assert these contract changes: that could change as rights retention becomes more standard in the sector.
From an institutional perspective, these approaches create problems for us. We want the rights retention process to be as smooth as possible for our academics, with the Research team in the library handling any issues which may arise as we will have the relevant licensing information to hand. Publishers’ policies create confusion for authors on what is required and, in some cases, result in additional work for authors.
We benefitted greatly from Edinburgh University’s expertise in this area, particularly their analysis of rights retention nine months after introduction[3]. They consulted with their legal team and established that publishers cannot assert that their contract with authors takes precedence over our rights retention policies. In fact, to do so would be considered a breach of contract: publishers have already been notified of our institutional position regarding rights retention. That has given us greater confidence in advising academics and that our stance is a defensible one.
*There is a specific Institutional Rights Retention Policy channel within the Jisc Digital Research Community Teams site (request access) where you can share ideas and resources around rights retention. Start discussions, answer enquiries, and learn from each other! If you have any relevant resources that you would like to share with the community via this channel, please contact Peter Findlay via email: peter.findlay@jisc.ac.uk
[1] https://www.uksg.org/newsletter/uksg-enews-582/rights-retention-a-roadmap-for-success/
[2] Webinar 75 – Open access and rights retention policy – Copyright Literacy
[3] https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/openscholarship/2022/10/14/rights-retention-policy-an-update-after-9-months/