21 February 2025
Liesl Rowe , Senior Digital Library Advisor (Copyright), Leeds Becket University
Introducing rights retention at Leeds Beckett (2) was the work of several years: it became a priority for us as an institution in December 2022 and our official start date of introducing rights retention formally was 1st September 2024. As I’m sure many colleagues who have been through the rights retention process will agree, the journey to get here was a fraught one. We wanted to make sure that we had a system that was straightforward for academics to engage with, supported by institutional policy and with clear communication to publishers. We managed to chart a course protecting those differing needs by reviewing the experiences of other institutions, wanting to replicate their successes and dodge their challenges. For us, it’s important to acknowledge the successes of those who came before us, whilst also wanting to share our experiences of adopting rights retention for other institutions deciding whether to take the plunge.
Support from Senior Leadership
We benefitted a great deal from significant support from senior leadership, both within the library and outwith it.
Our rights retention journey started in December 2022 with the appointment of Silke Machold as Pro Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation. One of her early priorities upon arriving in the role was for Leeds Beckett to adopt a rights retention scheme so that started conversations on the topic. Whenever we hit roadblocks, Silke was able to talk to the relevant groups and see about how to speed up the process. This was particularly helpful as our approach to rights retention was characterised by reviewing our existing research policies. Any changes we made had to go through several committees and pass muster with stakeholders across the university.
Rights Retention Embedded at All Levels
Speaking of our research policies, we discussed for a while whether to adopt a specific rights retention policy or not. We ultimately decided that we would instead incorporate it into our existing Intellectual Property and open research policies. We felt that rights retention shouldn’t sit on its own. It needed to be looked at in the context of our open research policy. We also needed to review the IP policy to make sure that we had the ability to act for our authors on notifying publishers and defending the right to make the author manuscripts open access.
This was the area which took longest for us to resolve. I started as copyright lead at LBU in June 2023 when the first reviews of the IP policy had started, and we finalised the IP policy in March 2024.
Community of Practice
We found when writing new policies that we needed to upskill our knowledge of rights retention and how it would apply to research. We had to master the legal and IP aspects of it, but rights retention was also distinct enough from standard legal matters that it required handling differently. For instance, our legal team’s initial suggested approach was much more like writing a contract such as discussing adding a section to the letter to the publishers outlining what happens if we choose to opt out of rights retention.
We needed to work out exactly what needed setting up as internal processes: what we needed to communicate to external stakeholders like publishers while also avoiding overwhelming academics with a complicated process. Reviewing other institutions’ work was a huge inspiration in drafting our policies as well as determining some of these “day to day” aspects of rights retention. Edinburgh’s blogs on rights retention; Sheffield Hallam’s (3) rights retention policy and Aberdeen’s (4) form for rights retention opt out were particularly helpful to us.
With the policies written, our next step was to start rolling out training for academics. We presented at a range of venues: department training days; research cafes; bookable workshops. The main foci for us in these presentations was briefly explaining open access, how rights retention fits in with REF guidelines and setting out what academics need to do as part of the new scheme. These presentations were kept to a tight 30 minutes. We wanted to keep them low investment timewise and encourage as many academics as possible to attend.
We also fixed a date for starting rights retention: September 1st, with any articles submitted to publishers after that date falling under the policy. That felt fairest for publishers as they would know at point of submission that we had a rights retention policy, whilst also easy for academics to remember as we were starting it at the beginning of the academic year. All that was left for us to do was contact publishers.
Team of Experts vs Single Point of Contact
The team who worked on rights retention at LBU had a range of specialisms. We had the research team, who manage the repository and author manuscript submissions; myself, giving the copyright viewpoint and CC license knowledge; an admin from the library’s admin team for administrative support. This was excellent as it meant that we had a variety of networks to call upon for finding out the impact of rights retention and our different specialisms came in handy at different points in the process. Equally, there was a point where a single point of contact was incredibly useful to us. The original plan was for us to split up the list of publishers to contact. However, due to other work pressures, our admin ended up contacting all of the list. This was invaluable as it meant she effectively did a second check of the list by having oversight over the whole process, removing any duplications and realising when searching for contact details any publisher mergers we were unaware of in our initial compiling.
Assembling the list of publishers was a fine art. We wanted to make sure that we contacted all the publishers our authors are likely to publish in, so chose to do it by looking at past submissions. We used Scopus and Open Alex to compile a list of where LBU academics had published in the last five year. We then deduplicated the list and ended up with a list of 220 publishers. By comparing the list to JISC and SCONUL’s rights retention documentation, we were able to establish contact details for some of them. That still left 150 publishers to find. These were quite challenging to find contact details for. We tracked down some emails, but some publishers only had postal addresses and some only had contact forms on their website.
We sent publishers an email explaining we had revised our Open Research and Intellectual Property policies, using post only when we couldn’t find an email or contact form. As part of our new policies, LBU staff and students would be required to make their work available open access on the repository under a creative commons license regardless of the open access route taken. The email also had attached a letter from Silke and from the head of LBU’s library, Jo Norry. The letter explained the process in more detail and that we were asserting our rights to the author manuscript. We didn’t require publishers to respond to us and largely found that people didn’t, unless we found that an email came back undelivered. It took us about a month for the emails to all be sent out.
Challenges Ahead?
I know for us and many other teams introducing rights retention, the most intimidating part was waiting to see the response from publishers. For the most part, we didn’t receive any responses. However when we did, it came in the form of pushback: Cognizant refused to accept our prior notification as a blanket declaration and want us to inform them every time we submit something which falls under rights retention.
Mostly, pushback has come in the form of publishers revising their author agreements rather than contacting us directly. For instance, Springer Nature state that papers with rights retention language won’t be rejected. No author manuscripts may be placed under a Creative Commons license, according to the terms of their journal policies, and any authors who want to do so can only publish under the immediate gold open access route. Authors are asked to agree to this when signing their standard subscription licensing terms. Authors must agree as part of their author contract to agree that Taylor and Francis’s publishing terms take precedence over any other terms they assert during the publishing process. They must also sign that they haven’t assigned rights to any other third party for the article or content that will conflict with rights granted in the publishing terms. Inderscience have gone even further. Due to the widespread adoption of rights retention in the UK, they now require all papers authored by someone from a UK institution to be published open access.
As such, we’re now starting to see the shape of publisher pushback to rights retention. All slightly different approaches, but they all have in common a focus on approaching the author rather than the institution as a whole. So where do we move forward?
I see two ways ahead of us. First, if authors are going to deal with publishers’ pushback against rights retention, it’s our responsibility as research teams to ensure that they have information of exactly what rights retention is. We’re still running sessions on rights retention as and when required to ensure that knowledge remains current for our academics. We also are able to offer advice if authors raise issues with us personally.
Secondly, it’s worth knowing our options if pushback progresses from challenging authors to legal action. We found a blogpost from Edinburgh (1) on the subject of restrictive publishing agreements very helpful. The crux of their argument is that publisher-author agreements can’t supersede existing agreements. For a claim of procuring a breach of contract to succeed, it must be shown that the defendant knew about the prior contract and intended to encourage another person to break it. Edinburgh’s solicitors have prepared a sworn affidavit to confirm that publishers were indeed advised ahead of article publication of the rights retention policy, so asking an author to reject rights retention would be asking them to breach the terms of their employment contract by accepting a publishing license. Edinburgh’s position gave us an idea of where we may stand if it does come to a publisher challenging their rights and for ourselves, we found their stance very reassuring.
Conclusion
What is certain is that each institution’s rights retention journey will be different: differing internal policies and levels of support from senior management will impact upon your rights retention journey, to name but two. Working together as a sector, those of us with rights retention already in place can help guide the way for those looking to introduce their own policies. It is also only together that we will see success in dealing with any pushback against rights retention. We stand and fall as a sector when responding to these challenges as they impact us all.
References
1. Edinburgh University (2022) Rights retention policy: an update after 9 months [online] Available from https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/openscholarship/2022/10/14/rights-retention-policy-an-update-after-9-months/ [Accessed 24 January 2025]
2. Leeds Beckett University (2024) Rights Retention and Licensing [online] Available from https://libguides.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/research-support/rights-retention-and-licensing/rights-retention [Accessed 24 January 2025]
3. Sheffield Hallam University (2024) Open Access and Rights Retention [online] Available from https://libguides.shu.ac.uk/OpenAccess/rightsretention [Accessed 24 January 2025]
4. University of Aberdeen (2024) Rights Retention [online] Available from https://www.abdn.ac.uk/library/open-research/rights/ [Accessed 24 January 2025]