Statement on Rights Retention for Authors

Traditionally, academic publication models have required authors to grant publishers an exclusive right to publish their work. This transfer of copyright means authors retain limited or no rights concerning where, when, and how their research can be shared. To align with the principles and practices of Open Research, as detailed in our Statement on Open Research and in our Open Research Policy, the University of Dundee encourages all staff and students when publishing the results of their research to adopt the practice of applying a Rights Retention Statement to the manuscripts they submit for publication. In doing so, authors are engaging with a process which facilitates the potential for wider dissemination and communication of research, thereby also increasing the potential for collaborations, engagement, reuse, and impact, whilst also ensuring that our academic community comply with our funders’ requirements.  

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

What this means for University of Dundee authors

For University of Dundee authors this means applying a Rights Retention Statement to their manuscript at the point of submission:  

“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.”  

Immediately, upon publication, the AAM should be deposited in the Discovery Research Portal, and made available without embargo.  

Academic staff and students should consult and familiarise themselves with their funder’s expectations regarding open access and the need to assert their rights in order to be compliant with their funder’s open access requirements.   

There will be exceptions to this provision and it does not yet apply to monographs, book chapters, edited collections, and textbooks.  However, authors are strongly encouraged to make these outputs open access through the Discovery Research Portal and RRS is essential for some funding sources.