{"id":772,"date":"2023-09-08T15:48:53","date_gmt":"2023-09-08T14:48:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/librarycollections\/?p=772"},"modified":"2024-07-25T09:54:55","modified_gmt":"2024-07-25T08:54:55","slug":"on-the-rights-track","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/librarycollections\/2023\/09\/08\/on-the-rights-track\/","title":{"rendered":"On the rights track"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sam Nesbit<\/em><\/a> (Open Access Librarian) describes the potential of the University\u2019s new Publications & Copyright policy<\/strong> in making our research openly available to all.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You may be familiar with the term \u2018publish or perish\u2019<\/a>. The presumption is that, in academia, your reputation is only as good as your publication record and that the rate of publication (and the \u2018prestige\u2019 of the publication venue) has a disproportionate effect on your career prospects. Despite the best efforts of almost everyone involved in the research process, this pressurised environment has persisted. For the Library, the question then becomes: how do we best support our researchers to publish when & where they want?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Researchers have long been able to submit their work to the publisher that best suits it, but the burgeoning Open Access (OA) movement began to shine a spotlight on the benefits of making research more accessible & reusable to everyone; focus also began to tighten on why authors had historically been asked to sign away their copyright to publishers by default.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lengthy transition began, shifting the dial from publishing in subscription-based (closed) journal titles to venues that supported Open Access (and, importantly, allowed researchers to retain their copyright and reuse permissions). Funder mandates and changes to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) OA policy in 2016 substantiated this ideological shift in ways that UK institutions were required to address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A brief precis like this obviously doesn\u2019t quite convey how seismic a shift it\u2019s been. I\u2019ve only worked in this field for 3 years but, even during that short time, we\u2019ve seen further developments in the shift towards OA. One notable trend has been the larger commercial academic publishers\u2019 ability to pivot their publication models to OA whilst maintaining their (sometimes hefty) profit margins<\/a>. Libraries pay handsomely for both subscriptions and OA, most notably in the form of so-called \u2018Transformative Agreements\u2019, big deals that bundle together subscription access and OA publication fees. Purported to be a temporary mechanism to \u2018flip\u2019 research from closed to open (or budgets from paying-to-read to paying-to-publish), these agreements have grown in size & scope to swallow ever more of Library budgets, so much so that Coalition S, a group of European research funders, recently announced<\/a> a restriction on how (and what) they\u2019d support going forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was Coalition S that reimagined a novel approach to circumventing the inequity of such pay-to-publish models of scholarly communication: the Rights Retention Strategy<\/a> (RRS). The UK research councils (UKRI) soon followed with an update to their OA policy in 2022, including a similar approach; subsequently, UK universities began to look at how they might address the growing problems of increasing OA costs and the persistent issue of researchers signing away their rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cue the University of Edinburgh\u2019s trailblazing efforts<\/a> to model something similar at the institutional level. Standing on the shoulders of giants Harvard<\/a> and the early UKSL<\/a> initiative, Edinburgh\u2019s policy signalled a sea change in UK university publishing and led to a slew of institutions<\/a> announcing policies of a similar nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In October of this year, Sussex becomes the latest university to launch a policy<\/a> that will ensure that our researchers can choose where they publish, retain the rights to their work AND make it openly available. The policy (like those elsewhere) applies to journal articles and conference proceedings[1]<\/a> and seeks to join the dots between UK & international funder policies, the forthcoming REF OA requirements and the surge of compatible institutional policies mentioned above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The aims of the policy are quite straight-forward: to enable researchers at the University of Sussex to disseminate their research and scholarship as widely as possible, to achieve the greatest impact and to retain their rights on subsequent reuse (rights that are often transferred to a publisher when signing a publishing contract). The mechanisms are a little more complicated but the policy\u2019s assertions can be broadly summarized:<\/p>\n\n\n\n