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.

Flying squirrels and medieval knights: the John Heath Collection

Matthew Wigzell explores the recently catalogues John Heath Collection

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Tales of a medieval knight, the writings of a Swiss pseudo-scientist, and an illustration of the hooded flying squirrel. There may seem to be no apparent link, but all of these can be found in a wonderful new collection of books recently added to the Library's Special Collections.

The collection was amassed by former British diplomat Sir John Heath (1922-2009), who acquired examples of books illustrated by his ancestors, including the well-known engraver James Heath (1757–1834). The books were left to the University in Sir John's will and have now been fully catalogued and made available for study.

The collection, which is a wonderful glimpse into the late 18th and early 19th centuries, has books on a range of different subjects, with a particular focus on literature, early travel writing, and scientific subjects such as zoology (with some amazing illustrations of exotic animals).

As an added bonus, many of the items have been ornately bound, making this a research resource with great potential for those interested in the art of fine binding, antique book illustration, engravings and portraits.

We have also been recording unique information about items in the collection, including the presence of bookplates, signatures and other provenance information. We have a full set of Bell's Poets of Great Britain passed down through three generations of the Kirby family for example, and many of the books in the collection have personal reminders of former owners.

I have picked out three striking books from the collection which came cross my desk during the cataloguing process.

First up is The history of the valiant knight Arthur of Little Britain: a romance of chivalry. A medieval epic originally written in French, the book follows the hero Arthur doing battle with knights, dragons and other beasts, storming castles, and foiling dastardly plots at the royal court (think Game of Thrones written in Middle English). More striking though are the image plates; beautiful hand coloured book illustrations which show scenes from the text. They have some great details, and some of the battle scenes are surprisingly graphic - seriously, take a look.

My second selection is an odd book on physiognomy - the 'science' of assessing a person's character from physical characteristics, particularly the face. Essays on Physiognomy was written by Johann Caspar Lavater, a Swiss writer and philosopher, and gained something of a cult following thereafter. Containing a series of engraved portraits, the accompanying text describes the character of each portrait, and analysis of different parts of the face.

One unfortunate chap (pictured left) is characterised as having a face showing "Corrupt rudeness, and malignity, contemning morals. Natural power degenerates into obstinacy, in the forehead. Affection is far distant from this countenance. Insensibility usurps the place of courage, and meanness the seat of heroism…. The thing most pitiable in this countenance is an expression of the conscious want of power to acquire the degree of malignity it may wish, or affect to possess".

Even animals don't escape scorn. The hammer-head shark being "a monster, 2. How infinitely distant from all that can be called graceful, lovely, or agreeable! The arched mouth, with the pointed teeth, how senseless, intractable, and void of passion or feeling; devouring without pleasure or satisfaction! How inexpressibly stupid is the mouth of 3, especially in its relative proportion to the eye!".

The final example comes from a multi-volume set, General zoology or systematic natural history, by George Shaw. The set has some brilliant early 19th Century illustrations and descriptions of exotic animals, manly only recently discovered by explorers in Australia. The books describe a wide-range of mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes and reflect the growing interest in zoology and recording of the natural world. My favourite is the truly terrifying Hooded Flying Squirrel.

There is also a wonderful anecdote about the platypus, and Shaw's (who was keeper of the natural history department at the British Museum) initial reluctance to include it in the book. The specimen at the museum was "the only one which had been seen, [and] it was impossible not to entertain some distant doubts as to the genuine nature of the animal … and there might still have been practiced some arts of deception in its structure … Two more specimens, however, having been very lately sent over from New Holland, the suspicions before mentioned are now completely dissipated".

All of the books in the Heath collection can be accessed through the Borthwick Institute for Archives, and can be found in the Library catalogue. From the Advanced Search option, you can perform a provenance search for John Heath.

Hopefully researchers and students find them as interesting to study as we did to catalogue.

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All photos taken by Paul Shields.

Telling Tales

Photo: Stonegate Night bw by Ravensthorpe.
Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

Back in the 1980s student life at the University of York was uninterrupted by social media. The internet was in its infancy and computer science students booked their hour-long sessions in the computer block just down from the Library (where we searched for books on microfiche). For entertainment, there were TV sets in the common rooms. We hunkered down in front of The Young Ones and had all-night horror movie sessions, mesmerised by the special effects in American Werewolf in London. The JB Morrell was closed on Sundays. Some of us (whisper it) read books for fun. We read alone. We didn't talk about it. There were no book clubs, nor did we spend much time recommending to our friends. It wouldn't occur to us to do so.

Tales of the City was just six years old when first I discovered a copy in Godfreys bookshop in Stonegate. A story of a naive young assistant moving from sleepy Cleveland to wide awake, loud and colourful San Francisco was the peak of exotic adventure to a student from North Yorkshire. The girl on the (cord) phone on the cover looked so glamorous. Standing at the back of the shop I read 25 pages (to 'Edgar blows up') and that was it. Hooked. 60p a paperback. In the days when we extracted five pound notes from the cash points in Heslington to last a whole weekend, this purchase was a little luxury.

I loved Mary Ann Singleton. She was embarking on a whole new life adventure. (In later episodes, when Maupin turned his sharp pen to harden her character, I am momentarily saddened, but for now she was the girl I wanted to be.) After the weekend, I headed back into town, back to Godfreys to discover there were sequels - More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City and one, deliciously entitled Babycakes. I read and reread, tracing every nuance, every development, laughing and weeping, but all alone. It never crossed my mind to share my love of these books. We just didn't, then.

Glide forward seven years and there I am, standing at the airport arrivals hall, holding my copy of Maybe the Moon. Feeling a little nervous, a little excited.

Alison Claire Barrow was twenty-one years old when quietly she discovered Armistead Maupin for the first time. Seven years later she is meeting him at Heathrow to accompany him on his UK book tour. Twenty nine years later (pinch me, where did that time go?) she is his long-term UK publicist and proudly out there and loud about it in this, her first ever blog, in the media, in events - and relentlessly on social media. How lucky am I? And still, in my head, sometimes I'm the girl back in Derwent College, flat out on the thin mattress of my bed on the second floor of A block, lit by the angle poise, reading and discovering Barbary Lane for the first time.

Alison Barrow
Director of Media Relations
Transworld Publishers