Universities pitch rights retention to ‘transform’ open access

N8 group of northern universities releases open-access statement in support of researchers’ rights retention

The N8 Research Partnership of the most research-intensive universities in northern England has released a statement on open access saying that greater use of rights retention could “transform” universities’ position when negotiating with publishers.

Rights retention is an increasingly common strategy to achieve open access, whereby researchers establish their rights to reuse manuscripts when submitting journal articles and then deposit them in an open-access repository.