#RetainYourRights [Test 1]
The action to retain sufficient rights for academic works
to make them immediately openly accessible and reusable.
The RETAIN project intends to accelerate the uptake of rights retention policies to empower authors and researchers by ensuring that they retain their rights to their work, facilitating wider dissemination and access to knowledge and reusability for the benefit of society, and advances science and education.
Copyright has posed a challenge to many authors, funders, and research institutions that wish to publish Open Access, since many publisher policies and processes are no longer fit for purpose.
When research is publicly funded, making it openly available aligns with the principle that public investments should generate public benefits.
Today, authors and researchers require the rights to publish, share, adapt, and reuse material for research, educational, or multilingual needs.
Rights retention offers one solution to the problem of proprietary publishing business models becoming a bottleneck to research, R&D and knowledge valorisation. Authors can keep, at a minimum, sufficient rights to make their research outputs available for immediate open access and reuse, regardless of where those works were originally published.
Key Issues
- Publishing rights are often controlled by the publisher through copyright transfer agreements or exclusive licences.
- Absence of a policy framework for rights retention.
- Lack of awareness of research outputs rights.
- Open Licences are not widely applied for sharing research outputs.
Rights Retention Approaches
1. Raise awareness of the rights to research outputs
- Research output is a product of authors’ intellect and labour and the author should have control over their rights and future use.
- Therefore, authors and institutions should know who holds what rights to their work.
- Authors and institutions should be aware of the relevance of retaining rights in relation to research impact Where the research has been publicly funded, it should be made available for free reuse. Doing otherwise undermines the reason why the research was funded in the first place.
2. No longer transfer copyright to publishers by default, nor make exclusive publishing agreements
- Authors should publish without signing an agreement that gives up their rights to freely share and reuse the work.
- Authors should be able to negotiate amendments to their contracts instead of accepting a standard contract on offer ‘as is’.
- Where publishers demonstrate their need for certain rights to manage the publication process, authors should consider non-exclusive licensing of such rights to publishers for a fixed term, rather than assigning those rights to them wholesale.
- Advice and resources for managing authors’ rights are available, for example, from Authors Alliance.
3. A policy framework for rights retention is vital
- Authors need to be supported and incentivised by policies from their institutions and their funders that enable authors to retain their rights over all published research output.
- Research institutions should also ensure that research outputs are available and discoverable from their repositories.
- See University rights-retention OA policies.
4. Make Open Licensing the default option for sharing research outputs
- Authors should be able to choose an open licence for sharing their research outputs, regardless of where those outputs were published. When the research has been publicly funded, the default should be a CC BY licence.
Calls to Action
What can you do?
Governments, funders, and institutions are responding to counteract publisher restrictions regarding rights retention and open licensing. Authors often face confusion when seeking the right to publish OA. Legal complexity and lack of harmonisation in Europe have slowed the uptake of institutional rights retention policies.
Institutions
Main Call: Provide an overarching policy framework for more open and shareable scholarly publications that removes barriers to rights retention and open licensing.
How:
- Adopt publication policies that include rights retention and open licensing, ensuring that these policies are properly implemented and understood by researchers, librarians, students and other staff.
- Undertake awareness-raising activities to explain the benefits of sharing research freely in the interests of open science, R&D and knowledge valorisation.
- Empower authors to share and reuse their outputs in education and research under an open licence, ensuring authors make informed decisions about rights retention and research dissemination.
- Provide technical infrastructure for rights retention that utilises institutional repositories.
- Offer legal advice to support authors in the rights retention process, including support when negotiating publishing contracts.
- Engage with publishers to advocate for change relating to authors’ rights retention, copyright transfer and open licensing.
- Keep abreast of rights retention best practices and the operation of rights retention where appropriate.
- Notify the publisher that an open licence will be applied to the submitted manuscript and to all subsequent versions, including the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM), which will be distributed immediately in an open archive/repository.
Authors/Researchers
Main Call: Retain sufficient rights to enable their research outputs to be openly accessible and reusable, preferably immediately upon publication.
How:
- Do not transfer full copyright or grant an exclusive publishing licence over their outputs when publishing research.
- At least when research has been publicly funded, select a CC BY licence.
- Retain all rights in their work, granting only the right of first publication to the publisher.
- Seek legal advice at your institution to ensure that author and/or institution retain appropriate rights to enable open sharing under copyright and contract law.
- Be aware that a CC BY licence is the recommended choice for disseminating and allowing for the free reuse of work. A CC BY licence requires reusers’ acknowledgement of the author.
Publishers
Main Call: Establish a policy framework that supports open access, allowing authors to retain their rights and share their work.
How:
- Do not require transfer of copyright, nor exclusive publishing licences. Instead, they should have open access policies that allow authors to retain at least sufficient copyright and related rights to share their work openly.
- Support authors’ right to make at least Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs) openly available by default.
- When publishing Open Access (OA),
- Provide the CC BY licence as the default option;
- Do not assert or claim any rights other than the right to publish.
- Accommodate institutional and funder policies and support researchers to abide by these policies, rather than forcing researchers to go against them.
- Ensure transparency by clearly stating licensing terms on the published work when publishing OA.
- Ensure transparency by clearly including the licensing terms in the metadata.
- Only refer to publications that are published under an open licence as “open access,” so as to avoid ‘open-washing’.
Resources
Reports & Position Papers:
- March 2025 | Building Bridges to Open Access: Paths to Institutional Rights Retention in Europe 2024 [English, Spanish]
- June 2023 | Opening Knowledge: Retaining Rights and Open Licensing in Europe 2023
- Executive Summary
- Infographic [English, French]
- September 2024 | KR21 Rights Retention Position Paper
Webinars:
- 20 February 2025 | Ten Approaches to Rights Retention in Europe
- 21 November 2024 | Rights Retention: Emerging Differences in Policies Across Europe
- 29 January 2024 | New Legislative Developments in Support of Open Science – Bulgaria and Slovenia
- 4 May 2023 | Enabling the Reuse of the Scholarly Publication: Modus Operandi et Modus Desiderandi
Open Educational Resources:
- Retain OER | Rights Retention Policies [English, Spanish]
- Retain Workshops | WS#1 Rights & Open Licensing in Scholarly Publishing
Helper, Glossary & Checklists:
About Us
KR21 - Knowledge Rights 21
The Stichting IFLA Foundation Programme in partnership with IFLA, LIBER, and SPARC Europe are implementing a three-year Arcadia Foundation-funded programme called Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) to reform copyright laws and regulations that enable libraries to significantly improve access to and use of copyrighted works.
KR21's project Retain
Project Retain, led by SPARC Europe, is part of KR21. Project Retain intends to accelerate the uptake of rights retention and open licensing to enable researchers to share their work openly.
Meet the Team
Ignasi Labastida i Juan
Rector’s Delegate for Open Science
University of Barcelona
Iva Melinščak Zlodi
Scholarly Communication & E-Resources Librarian
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Vanessa Proudman
Director
SPARC Europe
Clara Riera
Community Engagement
SPARC Europe & KR21 Programme
Jon Treadway
Director
Great North Wood Consulting
Join Us
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