CAUL and AOASG welcome cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy
CAUL and AOASG welcome cOAlition S Rights Retention Strategy
The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) and the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group (AOASG) welcome the Rights Retention Strategy announced by cOAlition S on 15 July 2020.
The strategy is a significant and bold step towards ensuring the achievement of 100% immediate open access for all research articles. It strengthens the repository-based route for open access and will ensure that by retaining their rights to their own work, authors are able to use and re-use their work as they choose. In essence, the strategy is designed to support cOAlition S funded researchers seeking to publish in their journal of choice, including any subscription journal. This strategy provides authors with a standard mechanism to retain the rights to their research by placing a CC-BY license on the author's accepted version which allows them to make this version immediately available on final publication in an open access repository of their choice.
Repository-based open access has been the preferred route for open access by universities in Australia and New Zealand since 2000 and is supported by the two main Australian funders of research, the ARC and the NHMRC. Advocacy efforts by CAUL and the AOASG have supported this repository-based approach.
This cOAlition S strategy aligns with a report produced by CAUL in early 2020 on Intellectual property rights retention in scholarly works at Australian universities. The report provides a starting point for Australian universities to implement a number of recommendations at the local level to ensure authors retain non-exclusive re-use rights to the Author Accepted Manuscript version of scholarly works. Under the banner of the Advancing Open Scholarship program, and in association with AOASG, CAUL is engaged in ongoing national cross-sectoral discussions about ensuring Australia is well-positioned relative to international comparators in relation to FAIR and open scholarship, including rights retention.
For comment:
Jill Benn, Chair of CAUL, caul@caul.edu.au, (02) 6125 2990
Virginia Barbour, Director AOASG, eo@aoasg.org.au (07) 3138 0623
About CAUL
The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) is the peak leadership organisation for university libraries in Australia. CAUL members are the University Librarians or equivalent of the 39 institutions that have representation on Universities Australia and the 8 members of the Council of New Zealand University Librarians (CONZUL). To learn more about our position on open scholarship see our policy Statement on Open Scholarship released in 2019.
About AOASG
The Australasian Open Access Strategy Group (AOASG) is supported by twenty universities in Australia and eight in New Zealand; Creative Commons Australia and Tohatoha, New Zealand are affiliate members. AOASG works to make Australasian research Open and FAIR and to promote innovation in all areas of scholarly communications.
View the statement.