Open access and rights retention

This page contains information about the SHU Research Publications and Copyright Policy for editors outside SHU who are publishing an edited collection with a chapter by a member of Sheffield Hallam University.

What is the SHU rights retention mechanism?

Sheffield Hallam University has adopted a Research Publications and Copyright Policy, which allows authors of scholarly papers in journals and proceedings, and chapters in edited collections, to retain certain copyrights over their Author Accepted Manuscript rather than signing those rights away to the publisher. 

Under this Policy, all Sheffield Hallam authors are automatically licensing their University, as part of their employment conditions, to make the Author Accepted Manuscript available from the University's repository immediately from the day of first publication under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. In order to ensure there is clarity about this position in copyright law, they need to include the following Rights Retention Statement in their submissions:

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

The Statement simply announces to the publisher that the authors have already applied the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to the author accepted manuscript that will arise from the submission. (You can apply licences to work that does not yet exist.) Once the publisher has accepted the submission for publication in the full knowledge that they have already applied a licence to the author accepted manuscript, this manuscript can be made available from the University’s repository from the day of first publication under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, without anyone breaking copyright law.

What does my SHU chapter author want from me?

The SHU chapter author would like you to be aware that they are going to include the SHU Rights Retention Statement in their submission and that they will be making the author accepted manuscript version of the chapter available via immediate Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence from the institutional repository without delay, i.e. from the day of publication. 

What about the other chapters in the edited collection?

You may want to consider how the rest of your edited collection could be made Open Access.

Your publisher may offer an option to make the published version of the whole edited collection Open Access, but there is usually an Open Access fee or book processing charge to be paid.  Alternatively, your publisher may allow for individual chapters to be made Gold Open Access (i.e. freely available from the publisher's website as the published PDF rather than the author accepted manuscript).  Again there are usually Open Access fees for this, but authors of individual chapters may wish to consider this if they have the funding to do so.

Authors of other individual chapters may have their own institution's Open Access policies which include a similar rights retention policy to SHU.  If not, they may still be able to make their chapter green Open access if your publisher has a self-archiving policy that allows this.  However, it is likely that your publisher's policy will require an embargo period and may limit how much of the edited collection can be made available.