Rights retention
Answer
Rights Retention in context
When a journal article is accepted for publication in a subscription journal, the authors typically transfer some or all of the copyright in that work to the journal’s publisher. The publisher then restricts how the work can be shared, and will often require authors who share papers Open Access via repositories to keep these hidden for a period of time. This is called an embargo period.
Embargo periods can range from 6–12 months in STEM subjects to 24 and even 36–48 months in the Humanities and Social Sciences. During this time, the published version of the article remains behind a paywall, and the version deposited to the author’s institutional or chosen repository is inaccessible. This significantly restricts access to the research findings, preventing discovery or use by researchers whose institutions do not subscribe to the journal in which the research has been published. Interested researchers, or people outside academia, are unlikely to be able to discover, access or read the research, thus limiting the potential benefit and impact of the work.
Rights Retention: a means of increasing access to research
Rights Retention enables authors to share the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version of journal articles immediately on publication, regardless of what agreement they later sign with the publisher, by asserting the author and institution’s rights over the research from the outset, prior to publication. The University of Manchester adopted Rights Retention in collaboration with the N8 Research Partnership in 2023. The University’s position on Rights Retention is detailed in the University of Manchester Publications Policy.
The University’s Rights Retention policy means that University of Manchester authors are able to share the AAM version of journal articles immediately upon publication via our institutional repository without taking any additional action, other than the established process of submitting accepted articles via the Open Access Gateway for deposit to Pure, or by publishing articles Gold OA.
Rights Retention: a means of challenging inequitable publishing models
The purpose of Rights Retention is to ensure that authors have control over the dissemination and impact of their work, and to promote greater access to, and visibility of, academic research.
Rights Retention addresses one longstanding and problematic aspect of academic publishing whereby academic authors assign the full copyright in their scholarly papers to the publishers of those papers. In taking these rights, publishers then enjoy all the benefits of choosing who can read those papers, in what circumstances, for what charge, including determining what the original authors are and are not allowed to do with the work they authored.
By asserting that authors retain re-use rights to at least the Author Accepted Manuscript version of their papers, Rights Retention ensures that authors always have the right to use and share their own versions of their papers as they see fit. It also provides a single mechanism that enables authors to meet any funder or institutional Open Access policies to which they are subject.
Find out more
- Open access accord ‘to weaken publishers’ negotiating position’
- The N8 Rights Retention Position Statement
Further support
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