25 October 2023
(Snippet from rom the blog post here)
The Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL), in alignment with their aims to collaborate towards the creation of a co-operative library infrastructure in Scotland, and to provide mutual support for members, supports the adoption of Rights Retention Strategies by SCURL HE Institutions. It is anticipated that SCURL HEIs will develop strategy, underpinned by our position, to facilitate the widest possible access to research.
Rights retention can be defined as the practice of authors retaining sufficient intellectual property rights to make their author-accepted manuscripts (AAMs) available without embargo and under an open licence, preferably a Creative Common Attribution (CC BY) licence, through an institutional repository.
Acknowledging that each institution will have different policies and processes in place, our intention is to provide a set of principles which can be adopted by HEIs to enable authors to retain their intellectual property rights and to not, by default, transfer those rights to publishers.