Rights Retention for Researchers: The cOAlition S Strategy

This workshop will look at the importance of rights retention for researchers and highlight methods and solutions to help the wider academic communities protect their copyright ownership.

Historically, authors would often give their rights away to academic publishers in exchange for the publication of their research. The publishers would then use that copyright ownership to charge readers for access to the published educational resource. This not only limited the author’s ability to disseminate and use their own work as they choose, but also access to and use of the work by other researchers and society in general.

One of the biggest changes to scholarly communications since the development of Open Access publishing has been that authors now retain the copyright to their own articles and other published research materials. However, many authors, institutions, and funders are unsure of best practices

cOAlition S, in collaboration with a number of leading European institutions supporting Open Science, has developed a new Rights Retention Strategy to help authors retain sufficient rights to reuse their own work, and not be constrained by restrictive conditions imposed by a publisher.

In this 1-hour workshop, Johan Rooryck (Executive Director of cOAlition S) will discuss the key points of this new Rights Retention Strategy.

What will you learn?

  • Gain a thorough understanding of the copyright issues related to scholarly publishing
  • Learn about the importance and benefits of authorial rights retention
  • Gain insights into the best approaches and methods to ensure rights retention