It’s the Open Research and Publishing team’s favourite week of the year, International Open Access Week October 20-26, 2025! This year’s theme is: Who Owns Our Knowledge?  

What better time to shine a spotlight on the University of Dundee’s Rights Retention strategy (RRS) which gives researchers a way to retain copyright over their work. 

Traditional academic publishing requires authors to give up copyright of their work to the publisher. This transferral means authors retain limited or no rights about where, when, and how their research can be shared – this is now decided by the new rights holder.   

Any time authors want to share their own work with students, colleagues, collaborators, or develop the work into another form, permission is required from the publisher.  

Rights Retention flips the dynamic back in favour of the authors who originally created the work. It enables them to keep hold of their copyright and gives the journal the non-exclusive right to publish the work. Authors can then share the accepted manuscript version of the work freely through their institutional repository immediately upon publication.  

This strategy has been successfully adopted over the last few years by a growing number of funders and universities across the globe, including the University of Dundee.  

What this means for University of Dundee authors 

For University of Dundee authors this means applying a Rights Retention Statement to their manuscript at the point of submission: 

“For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.”   

Authors adding a Rights Retention statement to a manuscript is a clear and easy way to hold on to the copyright and allows the accepted manuscript to be shared upon publication from the Discovery Research Portal.  

So, who owns our knowledge? You do! As the original copyright holder by retaining your rights you can make that knowledge openly available to be shared with as wide and diverse an audience as possible. Happy International OA Week! 

Contact discovery@dundee.ac.uk for support prior to submission. 

Rights retention: A Primer from UKRN  

Authors: Emma Colville and Michael Duncan