Rights Retention

The benefits to authors and the institution are:

• Authors retain more of the rights in their work granted them by copyright law enabling them to re-use images, diagrams, text etc. in future works without needing to apply for permission.
• Research outputs will be more visible and more accessible, including for policy makers, researchers, businesses, and charities.
• Funder open access policies will be more readily met without additional administrative overheads for academic and professional services staff.
• Potential cost savings as we may need to pay fewer Article Processing Charges.

We have an Institutional Rights Retention Policy. This policy ensures that Loughborough authors will be able to retain the rights in the content of their journal articles and conference proceedings (published with an ISSN). This policy: 

• confirms that the University makes no claim (as outlined in the academic conditions of service and the Copyright Policy) on the copyright and/or database right in academic communications related to research.
• Upon acceptance for publication each staff member and doctoral researcher agrees to grant the University an irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide licence to copy such academic communications onto the University Repository under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) Licence, or a more permissive licence.

We will be contacting the publishers where Loughborough authors have published over the past four years informing them of our policy and a formal start date will be agreed. The policy will be for articles submitted after this agreed date.

In the meantime, Loughborough authors are welcome to include a Rights Retention Statement which informs their publisher that they wish to retain the rights in their accepted manuscript. This statement is:

• For the purpose of open access, the author(s) has(ve) applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

In reality, very little will have to change for you as an author.

• When submitting your article you should include the Rights Retention Statement (see above).
• You should inform any co-authors that Loughborough has a Rights Retention Policy.
• You should continue to deposit your Accepted Manuscript to the Research Repository (via LUPIN) as you currently do.
• Repository staff will process your article in the same way they do now, with one exception. Once the article is published, we will make the Accepted Manuscript available with no embargo period.

The short answer is no. All articles published Gold Open Access (either through one of the deals we have signed up to (VPN needed if accessing off campus), through the payment of an Article Processing Charge, or where the publisher does not charge a fee) will be published with a Creative Commons Licence (usually a CC BY Licence) and so will be available for re-use anyway.

However, if you wish to make a point to your publisher that you are explicitly retaining your rights we would still encourage you to include the Rights Retention Statement on your submitted manuscript.

Yes. If you do not wish your article or conference proceeding to be included under the Rights Retention Policy we will allow authors to opt out. This process is still being finalised but the only reason we will ask you to contact us is so we know the manuscript is to be exempted. If we do not hear from you then we will assume any manuscript deposited to the Repository (via LUPIN) is covered.

No. At least 26 other UK Universities have launched Rights Retention Policies. As such, if you co-author with colleagues at any of these Universities then your article is already covered by their Rights Retention Policy even without Loughborough having previously had one.

We will be running sessions in all schools to help answer questions you may have as authors. If you have any questions in the meantime please do contact the Library Open Research Team.