Rights retention at the University of St Andrews
Many of the emails and questions the Open Access team receives can understandably be boiled down to:
My article was accepted – how do I pay the open access fees?
Open access fees, or article processing charges (APCs), crop up when a journal has either a gold open access model where all articles are open access on the journal website and the journal charges article-based fees, or a hybrid model that sees some articles made freely available to readers through the aforementioned charges and other content available through subscription.
If the journal a researcher wants to publish in is exclusively gold with the APC-based model, then these charges are inescapable, and we have funds and agreements that may cover these fees, though it is always best to read our agreements page to make sure you and the journal are eligible.
However, if it is the hybrid model, then there are other options. The ‘green’ model involves depositing your accepted manuscript—that is, the version of the article that’s been peer-reviewed but not yet copyedited or designed by the publisher—to Pure. The Open Access team then takes it from there, making it available upon publication, unless (in theory) an embargo is required by the publisher.
These potential embargoes can sometimes put compliance—with both the University’s own open access policy and the open access requirements of REF or specific funders—into question.
To support researchers in going green, then, we have a rights retention strategy.
What is rights retention?
Rights retention strategies have been around for a while, but really gained steam only in the last few years.
The University of St Andrews’ rights retention policy has been in place since February 2023. So far, we have notified over 120 publishers (and counting) of our policy, which allows St Andrews staff to make the accepted manuscripts of their articles available on Pure with a CC BY license applied and no embargo.
This enables St Andrews researchers to have choice of venue and is compliant with both our institutional policy and the policies of REF, UKRI, Wellcome Trust, and others.
Video: Rights retention at the University
While this has been around for a few years now, one of the things that came up in many of our recent school visits, however, is that many researchers do not know what rights retention is.
To help clarify this issue, we’ve created a video that St Andrews authors can return to whenever they are unclear as to what rights retention is or what they need to do to take advantage of it.
We hope this is a helpful resource that folks can watch and come back to whenever they are trying to understand this complicated information.
If you have questions about rights retention, green open access, or anything else OA-related, please contact us at [email protected].