OpenAIRE Supports newly announced Rights Retention Strategy for researchers
cOAlition S recently announced its Rights Retention Strategy which will support researchers in providing full and immediate Open Access to their articles via repositories. cOAlition S organisations will change their grant conditions to require that a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) is applied to all Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs) or Versions of Record reporting original research, supported in whole or in part by their funding. Publishers are encouraged to modify their existing publishing agreements to allow authors to make their AAMs freely available at the time of publication with a CC BY licence.

OpenAIRE welcomes this announcement. As an Open Science infrastructure that has supported open access to scholarly outputs for over a decade, it has developed a worldwide network of repositories which are regularly harvested, providing increased visibility and interoperability for peer-reviewed publications from thousands of research performing organisations.
It is in this context in particular that the Rights Retention Strategy is welcomed as a signal that will give support for and make it easier for researchers to deposit their articles in repositories. Ultimately this development will lead to more clarity regarding re-use rights for publications.
Creative Commons licenses are internationally recognised, well-established, and both human-readable and machine-readable. CC BY 4.0 is the optimum license to ensure interoperability, which is one of OpenAIRE’s main goals. Our support resources also recommend a CC BY 4.0 license for repositories content in our Open Science checklist on how to license repositories “
Making your repository Open”. This license allows users and machines to re-use aggregated data in data analytics, text and data mining, etc.
And enriches the OpenAIRE Research Graph and Explore portal
https://explore.openaire.eu/.
Over the coming weeks, the cOAlition S Office will be hosting a series of the publisher
webinars to provide further information about the
Rights Retention Strategy and to answer any questions publishers and journals editors may have.
OpenAIRE has supported the Open Science requirements of the EC over the years as well as national funders, providing national-level support and guidance. It has a wealth of
support materials on aspects of OS including legal issues. We look forward to the upcoming cOAlition S requirements in the coming months and supporting its implementation.
For more information please contact info'at'openaire.eu
Graphic from cOAlition S