Rights Retention

The benefits to authors and the institution are: 

• Authors will be able to publish their Accepted Manuscripts immediately after publication and will not need to comply with publisher embargo periods. 

• More articles will comply with the REF Open Access Policy, specifically the new 2029 REF allowances for embargo periods that came into force on 1 January 2026. 

• Research outputs will be more visible, read and cited, with greater visibility to policy makers, researchers, businesses, and charities.  

• Authors retain more of the rights in their work granted them by copyright law enabling them to re-use their own images, diagrams, and text in future works without needing to apply for permission from the publisher.  

• 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 Rights Retention Policy which has been in place since 1 January 2024. 

We have now informed publishers where Loughborough authors have published over the past four years of our policy, and notified them that all relevant research outputs will be included from a formal start date of 1 April 2026. The policy now applies to all articles accepted after this date. 

This policy ensures that Loughborough staff and doctoral researchers 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. 

Very little will change for you as an author. 

• You should inform any co-authors from other institutions that Loughborough has a Rights Retention Policy. 

• You should continue to deposit your Accepted Manuscript to the Research Repository (via LUPIN) as soon as possible after acceptance. 

• Library staff will process articles in the same way but, once the article is published, they will make the Accepted Manuscript immediately available under a Creative Commons (CC BY) licence without publisher embargo periods. 

Authors can contact the Library Open Research Team to opt out for specific articles. 

A Rights Retention statement is no longer required, as all publishers Loughborough University authors have previously published with have already been informed of this policy. Nonetheless, it remains good practice to include one. You can check whether your publisher has been contacted by consulting the list of notified publishers list of notified publishers. 

Please use the following wording if you wish to discuss the policy with your publisher or to add a Rights Retention statement to your article: 

“For the purpose of open access, the authors have (or author has) applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.”  

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. If you wish an article to be removed from this policy, please contact the Library Open Research Team. If we do not hear from you then we will assume any manuscript deposited to the Loughborough Research Repository (via LUPIN) is covered. 

No. Over 50 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. 

Please read our Rights Retention Frequently Asked Questions. If you have any further questions or suggestions for additional topics please contact the Library Open Research Team.