Retaining rights to make publications open access: the N8 partnership approach

Jonathan Cook is Open Research Project Officer based in Library, Archives & Learning Services. In this post, he looks at the significant collaborative approach to open access publishing announced by the N8 Research Partnership, and how it will impact York researchers and policy.

Photo: Lock on laptop, Rawpixel www.rawpixel.com/image/5908216
reproduced under a Creative Commons CC0 licence 

The N8 Research Partnership, of which York is a member, today released details of a collaborative approach aimed at strengthening and harmonising Open Access policies across eight of the leading universities in northern England. This new initiative aims to empower researchers to make their work openly available immediately on publication, removing current barriers to dissemination and streamlining an often complicated process. 

The N8 approach revolves around “Rights Retention”. In basic terms this is a recognition that authors should have certain rights over the research publications that they have created. In the past, researchers have typically been required to relinquish all rights to their research when signing contracts with publishers. This means they are left with limited ability to share their work. The University believes that open research practice enables a wide range of audiences to freely discover and engage with its excellent research, makes the research process transparent, and creates new opportunities for outputs and methods to be reused, reproduced and credited. If authors cannot exercise the rights to their research, and do not feel empowered to make their work open, these benefits become much harder to achieve.

This in turn can make it difficult for researchers to comply with Open Access requirements set by research funders. For instance, UKRI – the largest funding body in the UK – requires its authors to make their works openly accessible upon publication. This is often not possible in the current ecosystem, where publishers can place access embargoes on all versions of a paper, meaning the research may not be available until months or even years later.

Plan S logo, © Coalition S

Rights Retention in an Open Access context was first endorsed by faculty at the University of Harvard in 2008 and it has been the basis for many subsequent Open Access policies in the US, and more recently in the UK. In early 2022, the University of Edinburgh became the first UK institution to adopt a Rights Retention policy, with Cambridge and St Andrews among the universities that have since moved to this approach. Rights Retention is also the first principle of Plan S, the Europe-wide initiative towards greater open-access. As many of the largest research funders in Europe are members of Plan S, Rights Retention principles are also likely to be endorsed by a growing number of institutions on the continent. 

In the N8 approach, the researcher grants their university a non-exclusive licence to make the peer-reviewed Accepted Manuscript version of a research article immediately and publicly available as soon as the final version is published in a journal. This licence then has precedence over any agreement subsequently made with the publisher. A Rights Retention model simply recognises and reinforces the rights that an author should hold over their own work. The journal publisher retains their right to charge for access to the final published, typeset version of the work, ensuring that all parties remain recompensed for their valuable input.

N8 logo. © N8 Research Partnership

Rights Retention will make it easier for researchers to make their work openly available and enjoy the benefits associated with open research. By continuing to deposit manuscripts to the York Research Database, authors can be confident that this is sufficient to comply with funder requirements, as well as meeting likely eligibility criteria for future Research Excellence Framework exercises. This is a positive move, from a situation where the responsibility fell on the individual researcher to make sense of the complex OA requirements of their particular case, to an environment where the University takes leadership in facilitating the open sharing of its research. 

The N8 Universities will now be implementing these principles. Leeds, Newcastle and Sheffield have already announced their new Rights Retention policies.  

More information about how this approach will affect Open Access policy at the University of York, along with guidance for researchers at York, will be available soon.