Accessing our research | Crick

“A key pillar of our founders’  funding is that we make all of our research freely available.

We’ve supported this commitment through our policies and practices:

We accept preprints as citations in employment applications and group leader reviews.
We signed the Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age to help remove barriers to content mining. 
We signed the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) to help improve how the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. 
We apply a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide CC-BY license on all author accepted manuscripts describing work carried out at the Francis Crick Institute. This allows authors to share the manuscript with colleagues, use it in teaching and deposit it in repositories….”

GW4 Joint Statement Rights Retention in Scholarly Works

“The GW4 Universities—Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, and Exeter—have long-standing commitments to Open Access, underpinning the positive economic and social impact of our research within an inclusive research culture and environment. To this end, our library teams have worked together to develop a shared position and joint statement on Rights Retention. It is a marker of our collaborative commitment and our broader intention to work together to strengthen the UK research environment. Rights Retention is intended to provide academics with greater control over the rights in their own scholarly works. It does this by: • providing routes to open access publishing which are inclusive and contribute to a positive research culture • strengthening sector positions in negotiations with scholarly publishers • mitigating the risks of non-compliance with the terms of grant agreements • minimising workload and bureaucracy for authors.”

GW4 Alliance launches joint statement on rights retention in scholarly works – GW4

“Library teams from across the GW4 Alliance, a consortium of four of the most research-intensive and innovative universities in the UK: Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter, have joined together to publish a collective Rights Retention Statement, advocating for greater measures to support researchers to retain the rights to their work.

Rights Retention is intended to provide academics with greater control over the rights in their own scholarly works, enabling them to disseminate research and scholarship as widely as possible, supporting compliance with funder mandates, whilst also allowing them to publish their works in a journal of their own choice….”

ARL Comments on Plan to Increase Public Access to USDA-Funded Research – Association of Research Libraries

“On September 27, 2023, and October 10, 2023, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) held stakeholder listening sessions around their 2023 Implementation Plan to Increase Public Access to USDA-Funded Research Results, which included scheduled oral comments from stakeholders. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) presented oral comments at the October 10, 2023, session. ARL is pleased to now offer the following written comments in response to this request….”

Beware of License to Publish agreements: or ensuring authors retain rights to their openly published work – OA2020

“One of the key points coming out of the 16th Berlin Open Access Conference was the crucial need to fully enable author choice and author rights when publishing their research open access:

We strongly support retention of copyright and all rights therein by authors. Open access agreements with publishers should stipulate that authors only grant “limited” or “non-exclusive” licenses to publishers, and liberal Creative Commons (CC) licenses (e.g., CC BY) should be applied as the default choice. (…) author “license to publish” agreements should not limit the author’s rights in any way.

Not rarely authors are misled by the language of “License to Publish” agreements, unwittingly granting an exclusive license to all rights held in copyright to publishers, which is against the spirit of open access publishing and the licenses that support them.

In this webinar, Arjan Schalken of UKB (Netherlands) and Rich Schneider of University of California San Francisco (USA) talked about problems with current license to publish agreements and discussed strategies to prevent publishers from abusing restrictive CC licenses and ensure that authors retain all their rights and can decide how their work is disseminated and used….”

IPLC Response to the Article Development Charge Proposed by the American Chemical Society – Ivy Plus Libraries

“The 13 Ivy Plus libraries are both surprised by and united in opposition to the zero embargo option announced by the American Chemical Society (ACS) on 21 September 2023. This unexpected new charge is a clear challenge to both authors’ rights and the developing scholarly communications ecosystem. According to this policy, an Article Development Charge (ADC) of $2,500 would be charged to authors who seek to retain and exercise the right to deposit a pre-publication version of their article in an open repository once their manuscript enters the ACS peer review process….”

After the “Nelson Memo”: Key Considerations for Delivering on the Promise of Open & Equitable Scholarship

“This resource details practical steps that individuals and organizations can take to ensure that the emerging open-centric research ecosystem is optimized for equity, inclusivity, efficiency. replicability, transparency, trust, and engagement. It provides guidance to colleges and universities, public and private funders, professional societies, and others for aligning their processes and their incentive structures with open scholarship values. Additionally, It highlights a range of organizations that are exhibiting good practices in the field.”

Beware of License to Publish agreements: or ensuring authors retain rights to their openly published work

“One of the key points coming out of the 16th Berlin Open Access Conference was the crucial need to fully enable author choice and author rights when publishing their research open access:

“We strongly support retention of copyright and all rights therein by authors. Open access agreements with publishers should stipulate that authors only grant ‘limited’ or ‘non-exclusive’ licenses to publishers, and liberal Creative Commons (CC) licenses (e.g., CC BY) should be applied as the default choice. (…) author ‘license to publish’ agreements should not limit the author’s rights in any way.” Not rarely authors are misled by the language of ‘License to Publish’ agreements, unwittingly granting an exclusive license to all rights held in copyright to publishers, which is against the spirit of open access publishing and the licenses that support them. In this webinar, Arjan Schalken of UKB (Netherlands) and Rich Schneider of University of California San Francisco (USA) will talk about problems with current license to publish agreements and discuss strategies to prevent publishers from abusing restrictive CC licenses and ensure that authors retain all their rights and can decide how their work is disseminated and used.”

Comment publier en Open Access sans payer de frais supplémentaires ? – Open science : évolutions, enjeux et pratiques

From Google’s English:  “In the biomedical field, gold journals often ask authors to pay publication fees to publish in Open Access ( Article Processing Charges or APC). And the more prestigious the journal, the higher the costs. But then, how can you avoid paying APCs?

Thanks to the strategy of non-assignment of rights

By affixing a Creative Commons CC-BY license to your manuscript, you remain in control of its distribution. This strategy makes it possible to overcome the embargo period imposed by the publisher which can last up to 6 months in the disciplines of Science – Technology – Medicine (STM). Thus, whatever journal your article is published in, you can, without delay and without charge , make the accepted author manuscript available in open access in an open archive such as HAL ( green route ).

How to do it ? Find all the details for implementing this strategy in the practical guide published by the Committee for Open Science ….”

Open Access Week 2023: Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access Policy – Open Access and Digital Scholarship Blog

“After many years of work, the College will soon be able to announce that we are updating our institutional open access policy to allow researchers to make their peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings available on open access under a CC BY licence at the point of publication with no embargo. This will apply to accepted manuscripts, and enable staff and students to retain their right to reuse the content of those outputs in teaching, research and further sharing of their work. …”

The Scholarly Works Policy | Staff | University of Bristol

“To publish our research openly, our authors need to retain their rights to share their work. Traditionally, most publishers have claimed these rights in their standard publishing contracts, but to comply with funder open access policies and future REF assessments we need to hold on to them. To ensure our authors can do so, the University of Bristol has enacted the Scholarly Works Policy….”

Rights Retention Statement — SCURL

“The Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL), in alignment with their aims to collaborate towards the creation of a co-operative library infrastructure in Scotland, and to provide mutual support for members, supports the adoption of Rights Retention Strategies by SCURL HE Institutions. It is anticipated that SCURL HEIs will develop strategy, underpinned by our position, to facilitate the widest possible access to research. 

Rights retention can be defined as the practice of authors retaining sufficient intellectual property rights to make their author-accepted manuscripts (AAMs) available without embargo and under an open licence, preferably a Creative Common Attribution (CC BY) licence, through an institutional repository….”

Statement from Martha Whitehead Celebrating Open Access Week 2023 | Harvard Library

“This year’s International Open Access Week theme, “Community Over Commercialization,” provides a welcome focus on a version of open access we advocate for at Harvard Library: collaborative scholarly publishing models with no article processing charges (APCs).

Commercialization itself isn’t the issue — in academia we routinely pay fees for commercial services, and commercialization is often a desirable outcome of research and innovation. Our objection is the extractive model of scholarly publishing in which huge APCs of up to $10,000 per article are levied by commercial publishers, while researchers contribute the articles and peer review for free. This model has advanced profit-driven open access, but not equitable open access. Essentially it works against the original ethos of open access, which was to reduce barriers and enable the free flow of ideas and knowledge across the research ecosystem and to the public at large.

This is why rights retention is one of the foundational elements of the equitable open access models we support at Harvard Library. This year we’re celebrating the 15th anniversary of unanimous votes by faculty in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Harvard Law School to give Harvard a nonexclusive, irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly articles for any non-commercial purpose. Other Harvard schools and research centers subsequently voted to establish similar open access policies, and “the Harvard model” has been adopted by nearly 100 institutions and policymakers around the world. As well, we’re delighted to be celebrating the 10th anniversary of our Copyright First Responders program, which helps advance teaching, learning, and scholarship through community engagement with copyright questions, not just at Harvard but in many regions of the country….”