Open Access, copyright, and rights retention in the UK: a retrospective of the last 25 years

The routes to open access publishing are usually articulated by publisher open access (where the published version is open access) or repository open access (where the publisher grants the author the right to post a version in a repository).

However, open access advocates have also utilised copyright as a means to make research publications open access. Rather than cede copyright to publishers in Copyright Transfer Agreements, authors can retain copyright which would allow them to post their research to open access repositories without licensing or embargo restrictions. Authors, institutions, and funders passionate about open access and author rights have been exploring ways of doing this for several decades.

Early 2000s: Author Addendums

One of the first attempts to do this were Author Addendums where authors altered or made additions to publishing contracts to retain copyrights. Once copyright was retained an open access version of the paper could be uploaded to an open access repository.

Author Addendums had some support in the early 2000s, Jisc had a tool called the Copyright Toolbox that supported authors in crafting text that allowed them to control rights on their work.  The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) continue to have support on Author Addendums on their site SPARC Author Rights.

However, a study of Canadian researchers indicates 86% of researchers are unaware of author addenda and that the two major publishers that responded did not accept the SPARC addenda. This is no surprise as the approach relies on researchers to take interventions and potentially jeopardise acceptance of papers if publishers reject submissions with altered publishing agreements. Given the importance of publishing to researchers’ reputation and financial security author addendums have not been successful.

2008: Harvard Open Access Policy

In 2008 the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted the first university-level rights-retention Open Access Policy. This granted the University non-exclusive rights to post an accepted manuscript to the institutional repository and also made explicit that the author has these rights too, irrespective of any publishing contract entered into.

2017: UK Scholarly Communications Licence (UK-SCL)

Open access advocates in the UK looked to follow Harvard’s approach, with the United Kingdom Scholarly Licence launched in 2017. This licence would allow researchers to meet the increasing open access mandates in the UK.

These approaches removed the requirement for authors to directly negotiate with their publisher by having a blanket licence for all researchers at a university.

2018: cOAlition S & Rights Retention Strategies

cOAlition S also adopted these rights-based approaches to open access in 2018. Plan S is a set of principles around open access publishing funders could align to. cOAlition S sent a letter to publishers indicating the requirements that the coalition funders had on publications funded by them (i.e. immediate open access with a CC BY licence).  Some funders (e.g. Wellcome) also required authors to add a statement to submissions outlining the intention to deposit the publication in a repository with a zero embargo – very much like an author addendum.

2020s: Institutional or University Rights Retention Strategies

In the UK, Institutional Rights Retention strategies emerged from the 2017 UK-SCL’s efforts and now 49 universities in the UK have a Rights Retention Strategy. University Rights Retention Strategies work in two ways: 1) individual researchers are required to add an addendum to their submission; or 2) the University informs publishers that their authors have provided the institution with a license to upload a version to the institutional repository.

The most successful UK Institutional Rights Retention strategies are those that rely on the university informing publishers directly, with open access rates on eligible outputs at 90% or more in such cases.

2024: Secondary Publishing Rights legislation with zero embargo

Since the late 2010s, various countries in Europe have passed laws introducing Secondary Publishing Rights (SPR) for authors of publicly funded research. These protect author rights retention after an embargo period.

In 2024, Bulgaria was the first to introduce SPR with zero embargo – similar to the requirements of institutional rights retention strategies in the UK – into copyright law.

Some groups in the UK, such as Knowledge Rights 21, would be supportive of SPR in UK copyright law.

The future

Over the next 25 years, will institutional rights retention strategies have become the norm, with every researcher working at a UK university retaining the rights of their work? Or, perhaps, will researcher rights be protected under UK copyright law? Either way, the current movement towards retaining author copyright for publicly funded research is alive and well in the UK.