University of Exeter Institutional Rights Retention Policy

Abstract

Rights Retention refers to the practice of authors retaining certain rights to their work, including the rights to share, reuse and distribute it, rather than signing these rights over to a publisher. The University of Exeter waives ownership of, and acknowledges that members of staff own the copyright to, scholarly works they create. In exchange, authors grant the University a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free licence to make manuscripts of their scholarly articles publicly available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence or a similar licence terms. The CC BY licence is applied to the author accepted manuscript version at submission, giving precedence over any subsequent publisher's licensing agreement. This enables authors to retain sufficient rights to deposit their work in a repository and share it as open access immediately upon publication. The policy applies to journal articles and conference proceedings with an ISSN, submitted from 1 January 2024, authored or co-authored by staff or postgraduate research students whilst they are affiliated with University of Exeter. Authors should include a Rights Retention statement in their manuscript at submission and in any covering letter: “For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission". After acceptance, authors should upload the author accepted manuscript version via Symplectic to ORE, when this is required for funder or REF compliance, in line with the Institutional Open Access Policy.