“Representatives from the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford and King’s College London will share their experiences of developing and implementing rights retention pilots and policies at their institution….”
“Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act (hereafter: CA) entitles researchers to share a short academic work without financial consideration for a reasonable period. To facilitate exercising this right, the VSNU (Association of Universities in the Netherlands) completed a successful pilot project as a part of the National Programme for Open Science (NPOS) in 2019. The participating researchers gave universities their permission to share short academic works.
The pilot’s evaluation showed that the efficiency of the administrative procedures for researchers to grant permission (by two-way paper licence) is an obstacle to scaling up. The solution was found in converting the so-called opt-in approach into a tacit licence procedure with the possibility to opt-out.
The universities, as the employer, warrant the participating researchers to pay for the possible costs in the case of a legal dispute with a publisher. Within the VSNU, the universities agreed to share the legal risks.
Considering that:
the Eindhoven University of Technology supports the importance of Open Access, thereby following Dutch government policy as laid down in the letter of the State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science dated 15 November 20131;
Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act (CA) entitles researchers to share a short academic work without financial consideration following a reasonable period after publication;
the University has an interest in the academic output of its staff members being easily retrievable and, with a view to being a good employer, wishes to facilitate that its staff members can optimally exercise their rights under Article 25fa CA;
the University requires a tacit, non-exclusive licence from its staff members for the purpose as mentioned above…”
“In July, I will retire from UC Davis, after more than a decade serving as University Librarian and Vice Provost of Digital Scholarship.
A significant focus of my tenure at UC Davis has been advancing free and open access to information — both research and, for our students, affordable course materials….”
Abstract: To encourage the sharing of research, various entities—including public and private funders, universities, and academic journals—have enacted open access (OA) mandates or data sharing policies. It is unclear, however, whether these OA mandates and policies increase the rate of OA publishing and data sharing within the research communities impacted by them. A team of librarians conducted a systematized review of the literature to answer this question. A comprehensive search of several scholarly databases and grey literature sources resulted in 4,689 unique citations. However, only five articles met the inclusion criteria and were deemed as having an acceptable risk of bias. This sample showed that although the majority of the mandates described in the literature were correlated with a subsequent increase in OA publishing or data sharing, the presence of various confounders and the differing methods of collecting and analyzing the data used by the studies’ authors made it impossible to establish a causative relationship.
“We’re delighted to announce that the University of Cambridge has a new Self-Archiving Policy, which took effect from 1 April 2023. The policy gives researchers a route to make the accepted version of their papers open access without embargo under a licence of their choosing (subject to funder requirements). We believe that researchers should have more control over what happens to their own work and are determined to do what we can to help them to do that.
This policy has been developed after a year-long rights retention pilot in which more than 400 researchers voluntarily participated. The pilot helped us understand the implications of this approach across a wide range of disciplines so we could make an informed decision. We are also not alone in introducing a policy like this – Harvard has been doing it since 2008, cOAlition S have been a catalyst for development of similar policies, and we owe a debt of gratitude to the University of Edinburgh for sharing their approach with us. …”
“The SAP [self-archiving policy]
The SAP does not amend or alter the IPR Policy.
Unless the Researcher takes an alternative route to compliance with the relevant grant funder’s open access requirements (or the research funder has no open access requirements) and notifies the University of this by emailing info@openaccess.cam.ac.uk, the Researcher will:
(If the grant funder requires it) include the following wording in their submitted manuscript and any submission cover letter/note:
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;
and
automatically grant the University a non-exclusive, irrevocable, sub-licensable, worldwide licence, taking effect upon acceptance of the Accepted Manuscript for publication, to make the Accepted Manuscript publicly available in its institutional digital repository under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence from the moment of first publication (and / or such alternative licence as agreed with the relevant grant funder and the University in advance in writing)….”
“This page contains information about UK universities that have institutional rights retention policies. The raw data underlying these visualisations is available on github along with the code that generates this page….”
Abstract: Objective: The FAIR principles were created with the goal of enhancing the reusability of research data and to give guidance on how to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. In this article we explore the role of institutional research data policies in enabling and encouraging researchers at their institutions to generate FAIR data.
Methods: We identified the research data policies in place for “very high research activity” institutions (as defined by Carnegie classification) in the United States. We created a list of 31 criteria, based on previous work by Davidson et al. (2019) and Briney et al. (2015), and evaluated the 40 policies using a content analysis methodology.
Results: The guiding principles and the definitions for research data in the policies support the idea that institutional policies are a potential tool for the implementation of the FAIR principles. However, our analysis indicates that they are not generally used for that purpose. Only one policy mentions FAIR. Data sharing is mentioned in half of the policies, but 11 of these only note this concept in the context of funder requirements. Access and retention sections are mostly written without considering publicly available data. Twenty-nine policies do not mention data documentation.
Conclusions: We discuss ways in which these institutional policies represent a missed opportunity to implement the FAIR principles and suggest ways policies could be modified to encourage researchers to follow them. We also discuss future research opportunities to examine how policy implementation may affect what institutional support researchers receive.
“The Government of India is considering a one nation, one subscription (ONOS) policy to enable green open access to readers in India to journal articles published by the identified publishers. However, even if this succeeds, it will not provide green open access to pay-walled articles published by Indian researchers to readers outside the country or to readers in India to journals not covered under the ONOS. On the other hand, adoption of RRP by country’s educational and research institutions will enable free access to the country’s research output everywhere in the world. The ‘Open Science Policy’ (2014) of Departments of Biotechnology, and Science & Technology of the Government of India (https://dst.Gov.in/sites/default/files/ APPROVED%20OPEN%20ACC-ESS%20POLICY-DBT& DST(12.12.2014)_1.pdf) requires final accepted manuscript resulting from research projects, fully or partially funded by DBT/DST to be deposited at the institutional repositories or the interoperable institutional open access repository or the central harvester (www.sciencecentral.in). A rigorous implementation of this policy and the adoption of RRP by different academic and research institutions in the country will indeed open a wide door to the muchdesired open science…”
“On 7 February, Professor Nick Plant, Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation introduced the updated University of Leeds Publications Policy that came into effect on 1 January 2023, and which supports researchers to retain the intellectual property of their work. Nick emphasised how the updated policy complements the Open Research Statement to support an inclusive and collaborative research culture.
Following Nick’s introduction, Claire Knowles, Associate Director: Research and Digital Futures, welcomed Dr Theo Andrew from the University of Edinburgh, to talk about how and why their Rights Retentions policy was developed and lessons learned since its launch. Claire went on to discuss how we updated the Publication Policy at Leeds.
Full event recording on YouTube: Open for good: rights retention at the University of Leeds …”
“The workshop will outline where the Open Research Programme has got to, what its plans are for the next year, and will invite participants to offer their thoughts on how the programme might best meet its aim….
The UKRN Open Research Programme aims to accelerate the uptake of high quality open research practices by:
Providing training in a range of priority open research practices, especially via a train-the-trainer model
Enabling institutions to share and learn from each other about relevant policies, guidance, support and procedures
Enabling institutions responsibly to reform their recruitment, promotion and appraisal procedures, to recognise and reward open research
Providing insight on what open research practices are important and how they are adopted
Evaluating each of the interventions and adapting throughout the programme…”
“It is advised that all the scholarly works produced by the University funds or by other public funds either at Central University of Haryana (CUH) or elsewhere with CUH affiliation are to be deposited in the University’s open access institutional digital repository i.e. Gyan Pravah…. The University shall also set up a central harvester** using the OAI-PMH to harvest the publications of CUH researchers, faculty and students from the World Wide Web for the wider accessibility of the shared resources…. It is advised that all the archives, current/ future scholarly and grey literature viz., research articles, popular articles, book chapters, books, monographs, catalogues, conference proceedings, success stories, case studies, project reports, class/lecture notes, presentation slides, photos, videos, speeches, keynote addresses, patent grant publications, data sets etc., produced by the University or by the faculty/researchers/ students with CUH affiliation are to be made available in CUH- IDR…. In case of any copyright/ intellectual property rights issue/s with the data, information, or materials to be patented or commercialized, or where the promulgations would infringe a legal commitment by the University and/or the author, such data, information, or materials may be exempted from this Policy. However, after an embargo period once they are available in public domain/ open sharing/ archiving, the work/s is/are to be made accessible to the public via CUH-IDR…. All institutional publications of the University, journal articles, educational resources (text-books), edited books, book chapters, working papers, policy briefs, memorial lectures, research datasets, scientific data, final reports of sponsored projects, conference/ seminar proceedings, conference reports, information bulletins, newsletters, annual reports, audited annual accounts (which can be made public), booklets, convocation souvenirs and any other documents of institutional importance are to be made available in the CUH-IDR…. Preferably, the institutional publications such as journals, text books, proceedings, etc. may be published with open licenses. The authors of the publications may retain copyright of the work/s. 1.7. The University’s open access contents/ documents shall be licensed for public use under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC-BY- NC-4.0) and the same shall be registered with SHERPA/ RoMEO database. The faculty members, researchers and students are advised to refer to SHERPA/ RoMEO to know about publishers’ policies on copyright and self-archiving…. All the faculty, researchers, and students are advised to use ‘Author’s Addendum’ at the time of acceptance and while signing the publishers’ copyright agreements mentioning the University’s Open Access Policy to deposit the publicly funded research outputs publicly available. Therefore, the publishers should allow the final version of the author’s peer-reviewed manuscript to be made available via CUH-IDR. And in case of any embargo, it should not be later than 6-8 months from publication date for making the deposits open to the public….”
“Researchers at Oxford are invited to participate in the University of Oxford’s Rights Retention pilot. Rights Retention is a funder-led initiative that allows immediate open access of peer reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings when ‘gold’ or ‘read and publish’ routes are not available. Research intensive institutions across the UK are in the process of implementing rights retention policies.
The benefits of Rights Retention
Signing up to the Rights Retention Pilot has the following benefits:
It allows you to meet funder open access requirements where ‘gold’ or ‘read and publish’ routes are not available (information about open access publication routes)
It allows you and others to access your scholarly articles under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) Licence as soon as they are published
It will make it easier for us to support you in discussions with your publisher
It will help the University gauge support from the research community for rights retention to inform future policy positions.
We have created a guide to the rights retention pilot (SSO required) with more information on the benefits of signing up, the steps you need to take when submitting your work to a publisher, and the process for depositing your work via Symplectic Elements….”
“In 2008 Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously to adopt a ground-breaking open access policy. Since then, over 70 other institutions, including other Harvard faculties, Stanford and MIT, have adopted similar policies based on the Harvard model. In Europe, such institutional policies have, so far, been slow to get off the ground.
But we are beginning to see that situation change. Over the last months, an increasing number of European institutions have started implementing their own rights retention policies, thereby ensuring that research outputs are disseminated as widely as possible, whilst their researchers retain the freedom to publish in the journal of choice.
The N8 Research Partnership is a collaboration of the eight most research-intensive Universities in the North of England: Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York. Working together, all eight institutions issued a statement on Rights Retention, demonstrating their determination to support their researchers in taking control over their own work. In the following post, Professor Christopher Pressler, John Rylands University Librarian of the University of Manchester, and representative of the N8 Research Partnership, gives us a view from the ground and explains N8’s approach to Rights Retention….”
“The N8 Research Partnership represents the research-intensive universities of the North of England. 12% of all UK academics work at N8 universities as well as almost 200,000 students. The N8 is one of the strongest regional academic consortia in the UK and believes the time is now right to make a coordinated statement on the rights held by our academics over their research….
. In order to achieve this third route to open access researchers need to be able to apply a CC BY licence and place their accepted manuscript in an institutional or other preferred repository. This must now be done without embargo granted to any publisher….”