Rights Retention addresses a longstanding aspect of academic publishing whereby academic authors assign the full copyright in their scholarly papers to the publishers of those papers. In taking these rights, publishers then enjoy all the benefits of choosing who can read those papers, in what circumstances, for what charge, including determining what the original authors are and are not allowed to do with the work they authored.
By asserting that authors retain re-use rights to at least the Author Accepted Manuscript version of their papers, the Rights Retention approach ensures that authors always have the rights to use and share their own versions of their papers as they see fit. It also provides a single mechanism that enables authors to meet any funder or institutional open access policies to which they are subject.
