Developing and managing institutional rights retention policies

Introduction

An increasing number of higher education institutions (HEIs) are implementing institutional rights retention policies (IRRPs) which usually apply to university staff members with a responsibility for research. They typically confirm that members of staff own the copyright to their scholarly works but grant a licence to the University to make the author accepted manuscript (AAM) available via their repository under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This automatic grant of licence ensures that research findings can be made open access (OA) on publication, ensuring the benefits of research can be realised immediately in full compliance with research funder’s open access policies, including UKRI and Wellcome Trust.

Why rights retention is important

IRRPs are intended to support authors in retaining rights to their own work and to make repository-based OA faster and more frictionless.  Authors can then also submit their manuscripts for publication to their preferred journal, including subscription journals, whilst remaining fully compliant with their funder’s policies.

Find out more about rights retention

How we can help

To facilitate sector collaboration, we created a central community hub which serves as a place for sharing best practices, exchanging ideas, and discussing challenges and solutions with peers.

This space will assist institutions in making informed decisions on whether and how to adopt and implement an IRRP and supporting institutions post implementation with workflow development and impact measurement.

Join the discussion and use the resources

There is a dedicated IRRP channel on our digital research community group Teams site. As well as being a support network to facilitate conversation around IRRPs, and encourage the sharing of best practices, it also contains lots of useful documentation. Our members have shared a variety of resources with us to assist other UK HEIs in facilitating both the implementation and planning stages of an IRRP, and to promote collaboration. They will act as a valuable starting point and can be adapted as necessary.

These resources are available in the ‘files’ area of the IRRP channel (more information about how to join the digital research community group and access the IRRP resources is at the end of this guide). There are a wide variety of resources available, ranging from:

• Committee briefing papers
• Template letters to publishers
• Lists of publisher email and postal addresses
• List of UK HEIs with existing polices
• Communication plans

Connecting the community

We are enabling knowledge and experience sharing via a series of webinars, blogs and podcasts. This helps institutions understand what peers are doing in this space, instils a level of confidence when it comes to dealing with some of the potential issues, and allows them to respond to similar challenges and navigate their own process more effectively.

Read our blogs which detail institutional experiences of developing and implementing IRRPs

Watch the webinar recordings