Rights Retention is a way to publish journal articles and other research open access immediately, regardless of a publisher’s standard terms and conditions and without having to pay for Article Processing Charges (APCs).
Rights Retention works by asserting your rights in your authored research publications before accepting the publisher’s terms. This enables you to upload your peer-reviewed Author’s Accepted Manuscript (AAM) to our UEA Digital Repository (via Pure) without having to apply any publisher embargo period, and with an open access re-use licence of your choice.
Rights Retention helps ensure compliance with funder open access policies, for example UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Wellcome Trust, and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), and facilitates compliance with the open access policy for REF2029, which affects articles published from 1 January 2026. It is also beneficial for those whose research is unfunded or if you are an early career researcher without funds to pay APCs. Making all your publications open access without embargo can help increase the visibility and potential impact of your research.
From 1 January 2026, UEA will be introducing an institutional rights retention strategy to support authors with asserting their rights around making their publications open access. As well as helping make the University’s research as widely available as possible, it will help academic authors to meet funder and REF requirements around open access.
UEA’s approach to Rights Retention involves a change to the University’s Intellectual Property Regulations and an update to its Open Access Policy. Researchers still retain the first copyright over their research publications and their choice of publisher and publication. This approach will come fully into effect on 1 January 2026. You do not need to take any action at this point. We will be updating these webpages with more information and resources to help you over the course of summer 2025. There will be further communications during autumn 2025.
The policy approach applies to scholarly articles and conference proceedings. It does not apply to monographs, textbooks, book chapters, creative writing etc (but please check if your funder has any requirements around these types of output).
For funded research, UEA expects academics and researchers to follow their funder’s requirements on Open Access. UKRI* and Wellcome Trust have requirements around retaining your rights when publishing journal articles and conference proceedings.
UKRI and Wellcome Trust provide guidance on notifying your publisher about what you need to do to comply with their open access policies.
Broadly, you will need to include a statement about Rights Retention:
You should use the following text:
Make sure you replace the funder and grant information with the relevant information for your publication.
The statement should ideally be included in the following places when you submit your article:
*The UKRI open access policy covers outputs of research grants from Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Medical Research Council (MRC), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). It also includes some research funded by Research England and Innovate UK.
If you have any challenge from the publisher resulting from Rights Retention, please contact openresearch@uea.ac.uk for support and advice.
Additional point to note:
Where permitted by UKRI or Wellcome Trust, an Open Government Licence (OGL) or Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivatives (CC BY-ND) licence may be used instead of the CC BY licence.
From 1 January 2026, UEA will be introducing an institutional rights retention strategy to provide support for authors when asserting their rights around making their publications open access. As well as helping make the University’s research as widely available as possible, it will help academic authors to meet funder and REF requirements around open access.
UEA’s approach to Rights Retention involves a change to the University’s Intellectual Property Regulations and an update to its Open Access Policy. Researchers still retain the first copyright over their research publications and their choice of publisher and publication. These changes will come fully into effect on 1 January 2026. You do not need to take any action at this point. We will be updating these webpages with more information and resources to help you over the course of summer 2025. There will be further communications during autumn 2025.
The policy approach applies to scholarly articles and conference proceedings. It does not apply to monographs, textbooks, book chapters, creative writing etc (but please check if your funder has any requirements around these types of output).
The change to the UEA’s IPR grants the University a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use any Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs) of Academic Articles created by research staff for archival and open access purposes. In practice, this means you have the right to self-deposit your AAM to Pure (which feeds through to UEA’s EPrints Digital Repository) and make it available immediately, even if the publisher’s standard terms and conditions state an embargo or a different licence. The Open Access Policy gives more information about use of Rights Retention statements in submission, the choice of licence, or what to do if you think you need to opt out of the policy.
The advantages of this approach include that any publishers who objected would be challenging the University, rather than just the individual researcher, which may reduce the likelihood of challenge. It also removes much of the uncertainty around complying with open access policies for researchers.
Over the coming months, we will be providing more information and guidance on what this policy change means for you. You do not need to take any action at the moment.
To support researchers with sharing their expertise and findings more easily via the self-archiving route to open access.
To make it easier for those without access to funding to make their work open access.
To facilitate complying with REF2029 and other external policies around open access.
To constrain institutional publishing costs
To futureproof against any future loss of UKRI Open Access Block Grant (OABG)
To continue to allow immediate open access publishing for UEA authors if it is not possible for the UK HEI sector to agree on Read and Publish deals with publishers in future negotiations.
The aim is to enable immediate, unrestricted dissemination of knowledge within the research community and beyond.
Open access publications are not just free to read – they also make it clear how someone reading that publication can make use of it. One way of doing that is using Creative Commons licences. These licences are internationally recognised, easy to apply and to understand and used for lots of types of published material, not just research publications. They are also machine readable, which helps people find open access material.
A Creative Commons licence specifies the conditions that apply to re-use of that publication and typically require that the authors are credited. Creative Commons licences guarantees open access to the publication in the future and prevents third parties from restricting access at a later date.
For more information on the licences available, go to the Creative Commons website. The Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence is the chosen default licence in UEA’s rights retention approach as maximises the opportunities for re-use, and also ensures compliance with funder and REF open access requirements. If you think a different licence would be more appropriate for your publication, please get in touch with openresearch@uea.ac.uk so we can advise you on the best course of action.
