Rights Retention

 SOAS's updated Intellectual Property Policy and Open Access Policies include a Rights Retention Strategy (RRS), which allows SOAS authors to retain certain rights over their journal articles. 

• Under the policy, authors retain copyright in the journal articles they write, but license back to the university the right to make their Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) available on publication on SOAS Research Online without an embargo and with an open (CC BY) licence. Previously, the use of the AAM was controlled by publishers’ terms and conditions.   

• This means that SOAS authors automatically meet funder and REF Open Access requirements and is particularly important if you do not have access to publications funds, and a Read and Publish deal does not cover your publisher. 

• Other UK institutions, such as Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge have introduced similar strategies, and more institutions are joining them as their existing policies come up for renewal.   

What do authors need to do? 

• Authors need to do just one thing. When you submit your article, we ask you to include the following Rights Retention statement in the acknowledgements section of your submission manuscript and in any cover letter/note accompanying the submission:   

“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.”   

• If it is a funded article, you should also acknowledge the name of the funder and the grant number. Then once the article has been accepted, upload it to SOAS Research Online along with the AAM as normal.   

SOAS authors can find more detail on the Rights Retention process here (SOAS login required)