Research Publication, Open Access and Rights Retention Policy

In order to retain your rights you need to include a Rights Retention (RR) Statement in either the funding/ acknowledgement section or in the first footnote or endnote and in any cover letter/note of all submissions of your (co-)authored papers to journals and conference proceedings. The wording that you need to use can be found in the section below which also details the circumstances in which your output will be made Open Access (OA) on publication. You may include the RR Statement in your submission in these circumstances if you wish.

To comply with OA requirements, you will need to deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) of your paper into UDORA as soon as possible after acceptance, but before publication. See the page Deposit in UDORA for more details.

If you are working with co-authors based elsewhere, they need to be aware of the Rights Retention position at the University of Derby. See the page Information for co-authors at other institutions for more details.

If you encounter any problems with publisher push back regarding the inclusion of Rights Retention language, there are details about what to do on the Encountering publisher push-back page.

If you have any further questions, these may be answered by the FAQs section, the Glossary or Acronyms pages. Otherwise, please do get in touch by emailing rightsretention@derby.ac.uk

From the 1st October 2024, you will be able to retain key rights over your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in a journal or conference proceeding, rather than signing them away to the publisher. This is achieved with one simple action. Include one of the following Rights Retention (RR) Statements in either the funding/ acknowledgement section or in the first footnote or endnote and in any cover letter/note of all submissions of your (co-)authored papers to journals and conference proceedings.

Rights Retention Statement A

“For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.”

If the publication is a result of funding from an external organisation, authors should ensure that the funder’s details, including the grant ID are stated, as in Rights Retention Statement B, below:

Rights Retention Statement B

“This research was funded in whole, or in part, by [Insert funder name] [Grant number]. For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission”.

By including the RR Statement, you will retain the right to disseminate your peer-reviewed AAM by depositing it in UDORA, enabling Open Access from the day of first online publication under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence v4.0. There are earlier versions of the Creative Commons suite of licences but version 4.0 is the most current and was released in 2013. To find out more about the differences between the versions of Creative Commons Licences, please see the Glossary.

Please note that a CC BY v4.0 (standard default) license will automatically be applied to your AAM via your contract of employment with the University. However, you will still need to notify your publisher that a CC BY licence has been applied by including the appropriate RR Statement as above. 

When submitting a paper for publication the publisher will ask if the output is to be made immediately OA on publication. This is in reference to the final published version of your paper also known as the version of record (VoR). If you are publishing your paper:

• under one of the University’s Read and Publish Agreements, then the output will be made immediately OA on publication and all you have to do is add the bibliographic information and a link to the published version to UDORA.
• in an OA journal which does not charge an APC (Article Publishing Charge), then the output will be made immediately OA on publication and all you have to do is add the bibliographic information and a link to the published version to UDORA.
• via the Gold Route, which will mean that you will have to pay the publisher a fee to enable the final published VoR to be made immediately OA. You will need to ensure that the funds are in place to pay the APC. Please be advised that you cannot commit the University to any financial obligations without the appropriate authorisation.
• as an opt-out to the University’s RR position (see ‘Is there an opt-out option?’ in this LibGuide), then you need to ensure that the bibliographic information is added to UDORA and the appropriate version is uploaded. Be aware that this may mean that the output is not compliant with funder or REF policies.

If none of the above four options are appropriate, you should indicate that you do not intend to publish your output OA. However, under RR you are still able to upload the AAM version of your paper to UDORA to comply with the OA requirements, enabling immediate OA via deposit while also maintaining copyright to your work. Please note that following the implementation of the University's RR position on 1^st October 2024 the majority of publications covered by the institution's Publication and OA Policy will fall under this category.

If as part of the submission process a publisher asks you to sign over your copyright, this is for the VoR of your paper and not the AAM. (See Flow Chart below)