Adopting and managing institutional rights retention policies

Background to the project

Rights retention policies are intended to support authors in retaining rights to their own work and to make repository-based OA faster and more frictionless. Implementation of funders’ rights retention policies has prompted some academic institutions to take strong steps towards supporting their researchers to retain rights by adopting Institutional Rights Retention Policies (IRRPs).

This project aimed to support and accelerate the implementation of IRRPs within member institutions focusing on sector pain points with regard to IRRPs.

Why this matters

Supporting IRRPs aligns with Jisc’s business purposes including our commitment to:

• Support open access publishing through the repository deposit route
• Develop forward-looking sector requirements that advance research
• Empowering communities and encouraging conversations

What we did

• Created a dedicated IRRP channel on our digital research community group Teams site to facilitate conversation, create support networks and encourage the sharing of best practice. Please complete the registration form to access the group.
• Gathered a wealth of supporting material for the community including briefing papers, drafts of letters to publishers, lists of publisher email and postal addresses. These resources were made available in the ‘Files’ area of the IRRP channel. To access, from the main digital research community Teams site, use the navigation menu on the left and click on the link to the IRRP sub-channel, then click the ‘Files’ tab.
• Established a task and finish group to provide effective advice and guidance
• Ran two community webinars:
  • IRRP Question Time – watch the recording on YouTube
  • IRRP Question Time 2 – watch the recording on YouTube
• Shared five blogs detailing institutional experiences of developing and implementing IRRPs

This project focused on the following two priority use cases that were discovered and was guided by the task and finish group:

As a HEI I am looking to implement an IRRP and need help in:

• Making a case for an IRRP to my institution
• Informing my institution and enabling it to take decisions about whether and how to adopt and implement an IRRP, and to define the legal framework under which it will operate
• Defining an institutional IRRP (model licence)

As a HEI I have implemented an IRRP and need help in:

• Notifying publishers about my institution’s IRRP
• Providing helpful information and support for authors at my institution
• Responding to publisher pushback to RR
• Creating and implementing institutional RR workflows so that information can flow between institutional systems i.e. CRIS and IR systems

What we are doing now

We are looking for a permanent home for all the information we have sourced and will provide an update to the community in early 2025 about where this will be located. In the meantime, we will continue to work closely with members and stakeholders to develop the IRRP community as part of our support for rights retention and the move to open research. Please continue to use the community via the digital research community Teams site; we are always happy to add more documents to our resource bank and facilitate further conversations.