The University's Research Publications Policy was approved by Senate on 14th February 2023 following a University wide consultation process, and is aligned with the Open Access (OA) requirements of funders, including UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Wellcome Trust and Research England.
"Rights Retention" is an initiative from cOAlition-S funders, including the Wellcome Trust, UKRI and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, each of whom has published cOAlition-S aligned policies which include a rights retention requirement.
In January 2023, the N8 Research Partnerhsip universities (comprising the universities of Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York) published a Statement on Rights Retention, with a clear position from all institutions recognising that:
Rights retention supports the green (self-archiving) open access route and aims to allow an author to publish in their journal of choice (even if that published Version of Record (VoR) remains behind a subscription paywall), whilst ensuring an author retains the right to share their Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) immediately upon publication, in line with the expectations of their funder.
The author, or their institution (or both) notify the publisher that a prior licence has been applied to the AAM, granting rights to share that in line with any funder or other requirements.
The intended outcome is that:
The key expectation on authors from funders is to make their research articles Open Access immediately on publication, without embargo, and under a clear open licence, usually a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.
This can usually be done through various means, including publishing in a fully open access journal, or publishing in a hybrid journal which allows individual articles to be made open access.
These routes often come with a cost for an author, so many funders also allow an author to meet their open access obligations by self-archiving their AAM, as long as this is made available no later than the date of publication, and under an appropriate open licence. This is referred to as Route 2 in both the UKRI and Wellcome Trust Open Access policies.
The Rights Retention approach is aimed to support authors in retaining sufficient rights in their AAM to allow them to meet those requirements, irrespective of any embargo a journal might require on providing access to that AAM.
For most authors, no additional action is required under the Research Publications Policy beyond depositing your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in to Durham Research Online (DRO).
We have outlined below some key actions/considerations for authors when submitting their articles for publication.
On submission, author's should:
On acceptance, author's should:
This is advice is for research articles in scope of the UKRI Open Access policy, submitted on or after 1st April 2022.
Durham University strongly recommends the inclusion of a Rights Retention Statement in any article when submitting for publication; but some funders require authors to include this statement.
At the point of submission
When submitting to a journal that is not fully open access, researcher's acknowledging UKRI funding should:
[Note that, where the researcher has requested and received permission from their funder to use an alternate open licence, then the licence applied can be substituted in the wording included.]
At the point of acceptance
If the journal will not be published open access (e.g. through the payment of an APC, or through a transitional agreement with the publisher), the researcher should deposit a copy of their author accepted manuscript (AAM) in Durham Research Online (DRO), including the Rights Retention Statement. The DRO team will then ensure that the AAM is made open access in line with their funder's requirements once the article has been published.
This is advice is for research articles in scope of the Wellcome Trust Open Access policy, submitted on or after 1st January 2021.
Durham University strongly recommends the inclusion of a Rights Retention Statement in any article when submitting for publication; but some funders require authors to include this statement.
At the point of submission
When submitting to any journal, researcher's acknowledging Wellcome Trust funding:
[Note that, where the researcher has requested and received permission from their funder to use an alternate open licence, then the licence applied can be substituted in the wording included.]
Wellcome have added guidance to their policy, notifying authors that "You should not sign a publishing contract that conflicts with our open access requirements. These are set out in our grant conditions"
At the point of acceptance
If the journal will not be published open access (e.g. through the payment of an APC, or through a transitional agreement with the publisher), the researcher should deposit a copy of their author accepted manuscript (AAM) in Durham Research Online (DRO), including the Rights Retention Statement. The DRO team will then ensure that the AAM is made open access in line with their funder's requirements once the article has been published.
The following Frequent Asked Questions provide information to authors to help them make their research open access immediately upon publication under the University's Research Publications Policy.
For additional help and support, please contact us.
Please note, you can also access the N8 Research Partnerships Rights Retention FAQs page, although the FAQs below are specifically aimed to support Durham authors.
We will be running a series of bookable briefing and Q&A workshops in person and online from April 2023.
If alternatively you would like us to run a session for a department or research group, please contact us to discuss.
