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This page sets out rights retention actions for UCL authors.
UCL's pre-existing licence to use scholarly materials for academic and research purposes arises automatically under the UCL Intellectual Property (IP) Policy. This allows UCL to make the accepted manuscript of scholarly articles publicly available under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) in UCL Discovery.
In recognition of the rights retention provisions in the UCL Publications Policy, UCL staff members should follow the two simple pre-submission steps below. These actions will (1) ensure that their co-authors are aware of the licence and (2) support UCL's notifications to publishers. Every UCL researcher must upload their accepted manuscripts to RPS on or before publication. These requirements do not apply to articles published Gold open access, whether in a fully open access journal, through UCL's transformative agreements or via other means.
Before submission
1. Inform co-authors not at UCL
Where an article includes a co-author at another institution, the UCL author(s) should inform their co-authors at the earliest opportunity that UCL will make the accepted manuscript open access in UCL Discovery, without an embargo, under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This does not apply to articles that will be published Gold open access, either in a fully open access journal or through UCL's transformative agreements. The following suggested text can be used:
Dear co-author(s),
In common with many other UK universities, the UCL Publications Policy incorporates rights retention. This means that I automatically give UCL the right to make the accepted manuscripts of my scholarly articles open access under a CC BY licence, without an embargo. This benefits my co-authors too, as it also allows them to reuse and share these manuscripts in their own repositories and elsewhere.
Please let me know if you think there is any reason why we cannot make our accepted manuscript available on this basis.
2. Include a rights retention statement
UCL has informed most publishers of UCL's pre-existing licence. However, to ensure that your publisher has notice of the policy, it is recommended that when submitting a scholarly article you include the following statement in the covering letter and acknowledgements section:
"For the purpose of open access, the author(s) has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission."
An alternative statement with the same intention, if required by specific funders such as UKRI, may be used instead.
UCL strongly encourages researchers to make other types of output, including books, book chapters and edited collections, as openly available as possible. Authors seeking to take advantage of rights retention for these outputs should ensure that the statement above is included in their contract with the publisher.
On or before publication
Upload your accepted manuscript
On or before the first online publication date, upload your final accepted manuscript to RPS. See our guides to using RPS, and our step-by-step guide to making your paper eligible for REF 2029.
If your funder requires open access in a subject repository (e.g. Europe PMC), you also need to deposit your accepted manuscript there, with a 0 embargo and the CC BY licence. See our Research funders pages.