Publishing OA books

Rights Retention

Published November 11 2024 | Revised November 26 2024

Rights retention is a practice in which authors or their institution retain sufficient rights to a publication, enabling them to make the accepted manuscript version available open access, regardless of a publisher’s policy.

Rights retention may be enabled by:

  • Authors: Authors may include a rights retention statement at the point of submitting their proposal for publication. The statement typically declares that the author retains the right to share the accepted version of the manuscript through a Creative Commons attribution licence and without a publisher embargo.
  • Institutions: Institutions may have a policy to support rights retention. Typically, the institution applies a non-exclusive licence to their employee’s work, including the right to share the accepted version of the publication with a Creative Commons attribution licence and without an embargo period.
  • Funders: Funders may require award holders to retain sufficient rights to ensure that they can meet the funders’ open access requirements. Some funders’ journal policies require authors to include rights-retention wording when submitting their research outputs to publishers; it is possible that such requirements could be introduced for books in the future.

Rights retention for books and book chapters is an emerging area and authors may wish to consult their institution’s rights retention policy (if there is one) and research support teams for up-to-date information. A funder or institutional policy may also provide support and legal reassurance.

It is important to note that rights retention for books and chapters must be declared at the point of submission of the initial proposal and before any contract is signed. It must be transparent to the publisher from the very beginning. Book contracts can potentially be signed in advance of manuscript submission, so waiting until the final text is submitted is too late to establish legal precedence.

Typically, publishers’ book and chapter contracts for non-open access works ask authors to transfer exclusive rights to the publisher. If your institution requires a non-exclusive license to share the accepted version of your work, or if you have declared that you are retaining your rights, this may be incompatible with signing the publisher agreement. In this situation you should discuss the next steps with your publisher; you may also wish to consult with your institution’s research support or legal team for local guidance because policies and practices vary.

Options include but are not limited to:

  • Receiving guidance from your research support or legal team
  • Negotiating with the publisher to ensure that the accepted manuscript can be shared
  • Paying for open access with a CC-BY licence if you have access to funds and wish to do so
  • Asking your institution or funder for an exemption from the policy

This article has focused on rights retention as a tool for enabling open access to books and chapters that are not published via an open access route. However, if an open access publication route is being followed, it is worth considering the rights that you retain as an author.

Creative Commons License
This article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.