Rights Retention Strategy (RRS)

To help researchers acknowledge and assert their rights, cOAlition S launched an online campaign, “Publish with Power: Protect your rights”.

Why is RRS necessary?

The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) enables authors to exercise the rights they have on their manuscripts to deposit a copy of the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in a repository on publication and provide open access to it.

The campaign encourages researchers to retain intellectual property rights, explains the steps to take and highlights the benefits for authors, science and society.

What can you do?

On the cOAlition S website, you’ll find a suite of resources about the Rights Retention Strategy, freely available for downloading, using and sharing.

For example, this explainer video: How to reuse & share your knowledge as you wish through Rights Retention.

Read more about RRS on the cOAlition S website.

Our thoughts on RRS

How publishers deal with adding an RRS statement to a submitted manuscript is not entirely clear.

The application of the RRS is essential to be able to comply with the agreements with a funder when you select a journal that is not compliant. The journals with which the Dutch universities have an APC deal and all journals registered in DOAJ – all listed in our OA Journal Browser – are compliant with the requirements of the cOAlition S funders, so the use of RRS is often not necessary. But be careful with journals that are not compliant.

If a cOAlition S funder funded the research from which your article originates, check with the journal selection and, in any case, before submitting a manuscript whether the selected journal is compliant with the agreement (use the Plan S journal checker tool). If not, choose a compliant title, or submit the manuscript with the necessary RRS paragraph. As a result, the author’s version (AAM) may be shared directly and with a CC-BY license via our repository at the time of publishing. Therefore, the journal of your choice is still not compliant with the funder requirements, but your article is.

More information

If you have questions regarding the use of RRS, you can always contact an Open Access publishing specialist at the library. Or leave a comment at the bottom of this message.

Ron Aardening.