(Episode 112) Open for Good: Rights Retention at the University of Leeds

Intro / outro: 00:00:00

Welcome to the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, where in every episode we explore what is research culture and what should it be. You'll hear thoughts and opinions from a range of contributors to help you change research culture into what you want it to be.

:: 00:25

So I'll let them introduce themselves in a moment, in a bit more detail and say a bit about their roles and how it relates to rights retention. But just to say that this follows on from my recent conversation with Jon and Iva from Project Retain, a European project looking at this issue across Europe with case studies from 10 different countries, including the uk and who published their second report at the end of March, which includes the N8 research partnership as one of those case studies, and of which of course Leeds is a member.

So I'm interested today to talk to Jane and Jonathan about rights retention in a more local context, why it's important for research it Leeds, what are the implications for academic colleagues and what do they need to know? So if I can come to you first, Jonathan, and welcome to Research Culture Uncovered.

:: 01:23

So UKRI introduced their rights retention requirement in 2022. And then, uh, we followed suit with, , the University of Leeds Publications policy in 2023.

:: 02:18

00:02:28 Jane Saunders: So I suppose I, not, not necessarily in this role, but I go back a long way in terms of interest in the whole, open access area. I mean, I remember back in the early two thousands when we were creating our, White Rose Research Online shared institutional repository, and the excitement that generated and the feeling that we were on the cusp of making some big changes, and really, yeah, making an impact in terms of getting research outputs more visible and out from behind paywalls, obviously it's been a really long journey since then. I came into this role of, Associate Director for Content and Discovery, gosh, I'm trying to think when, must have been about eight, eight years ago, and, and that was really at the time, around the time I, I guess of the first, read and publish deals in the uk, these so-called, transitional deals, which were really supposed to be moving that dial from paying for subscriptions to, paying to publish as part of this open landscape.

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00:04:34 Nick Sheppard: I think you both listened to the conversation I had with John and Iva, and that was one of the things that I was trying to pick up towards the end I think, was the fact that, as you say, it hasn't really transitioned... we're not quite sure why, I guess, market forces perhaps in terms of why we haven't moved to full open access in the way that we'd hoped, and the big deals are up for negotiation I think this year? Perhaps, Jane, you could tell us a little bit about what that... I know it's still ongoing, but give us a sense of where those negotiations are and what it might mean for Leeds or the sector going forward?

:: 05:09

So, Jisc, bearing in mind the the review that they undertook last year, the response of the sector, have determined that there's an appetite to do something different, to get a different kind of deal that gets us away, from particularly focused on sort of article based models of these deals where you are, you're paying, where, you know, costs seem to be calculated on a per article basis, and that's driving up publishing of articles, which is driving up the costs.

So it is an opportunity to refocus on what we want from a deal in terms of supporting open research culture, what that means more widely, and what the publisher is doing to support that. And an opportunity to look at how we constrain the costs across the sector as well. So it's as yet unclear as to the deals that are going to be put on the table. I think we're expecting sort of July, August time, to get some more information about how those deals might look. I think there's a sense in the sector that to date we've been able through the big deals to have pretty much comprehensive access to content and comprehensive access to open publishing in that content.

And that actually maybe it's not gonna be possible, both from, you know, the, the constraints that publishers might be working with and the constraints that are on us in the higher education sector, it might not be possible for us to actually have deals that cover absolutely everything and that we might need to be looking at taking smaller sets of content.

So there will be, well, there will be, there could possibly be, , impacts in terms of how we approach the discovery, , and access of content. You know, mitigations would include reliance on post cancellation access. So we will retain access to everything that we've already paid for using tools that help our users to find content that is openly accessible. So at Leeds we have Lean Library, and also using document supply, which in recent years has been able to supply articles much more quickly than was the case in the past. And of course for publishing it might mean that we no longer have publishing wrapped up in deals and that maybe what we're looking at is relying on our rights retentions policies in order to be able to publish in an open way that enables us to meet funder and government requirements.

:: 08:24

So I suppose what we're saying is, don't panic that it's not necessarily going to affect us in the same way, but it might get to the point where we can't have the same coverages that we've enjoyed over the past few years.

:: 08:57

Absolutely.

:: 09:00

So you and I both do a lot of advocacy, don't we, with colleagues, uh, academic colleagues talking about open research and open access. What do you think are some of the messages we need to get out to colleagues in this context, around right retention?

:: 09:35

I think in a lot of the advocacy sessions that I've done, when you speak to people about rights retention, there's a... it's almost a sort of tangible surprise that this is something that we're able to do. I think we've spent so many years drilling into academics and researchers that they need to be aware of and think about embargo periods in journals, be that for funder compliance or ref compliance.

I think it's something that, while not quite second nature was always something that they were somewhat aware of in the back of their heads. And then to go to a position where, because of rights retention, it's not something they need to worry about anymore, I think is quite a dramatic shift.

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00:11:01 Nick Sheppard: It's just habituated, isn't it? I suppose with, with researchers, they've got to this state situation where they routinely are expected to give this copyright over to authors. But there is provision from the conversation with John and Iva that it seems to have been established, I think in UK copyright law, that actually there's a prior agreement with the university, which is what we've done as a university to carve out that copyright permission that we own the initial license and that can't be superseded by a later license.

So I suppose in terms of the messages for our researchers, it's not, they don't need to be too concerned about the mechanics of it. We've taken care of that part of it for them?

:: 11:41

I think one of the biggest blockers to rights retention at the moment is the conflicting messaging that publishers are presenting in that sense. I think it's fairly safe to say that in the last few years that between the institutions that have implemented their own policies and the varying levels of legal advice they've all received, even going back to some of the work on the, UK Scholarly Communications License in the 2010s, , uh, I think that was a fairly established and settled agreement that they were on solid legal grounds with doing what they were doing, and that's almost undone to an extent when a author is confronted with a publisher workflow that states the exact opposite of what we're trying to reassure them about. And I couldn't say to what extent that's deliberate from publishers or just them moving at a glacial pace to update their copyright agreements and copyright transfer agreements and license to publish agreements. But it's an obstacle that exists when I think you've got, on the one hand, your institution telling you one thing that you're okay and on solid legal ground and on the other you've got a publisher telling you to sign an agreement that conflicts with everything you are being told by your institution.

I can, I can understand why there is some reluctance forthcoming from academics that are publishing and potentially using rights retention for the first time. But as much as it, as much as it can be settled and established that that carve out exists, it's, yeah, just trying to, trying to stress that we've done our due diligence, been through all the checks necessary to proceed to an institutional policy. And we are ultimately comfortable with that level of risk, if there even is much risk anymore in actually I implementing rights retention.

:: 13:51

00:14:35 Jonathan Horne: Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think those barriers take many different, , different sort of shapes and forms. And I think, I think most prominent amongst them is the ability for publishers to route authors down a gold or, or paid for open access route. I think it's almost nigh on impossible to publish these days with a journal or a publisher that doesn't have some sort of monetized open access option. I think what, what I'd refer to as green only, or, or subscription only journals, they almost don't exist anymore. And I think that's because open access has become such big business.

:: 15:09

00:15:11 Jane Saunders: No, I was just gonna say I think we have seen some publishers respond in ways that are worrying, you know, which, which you could crudely say are attempting to monetize green open access. So for example, you know, the article development charge coming from the American Chemical Society, , the repository licensing fee that, that, that's been put forward by IEEE, I think those are moves that we want to resist because, you know, as we've already said, we've, we have prior rights asserted over the content. There's no reason why we would have to pay to make a version accessible in, in our institutional repository, but as Jonathan says, when the author is submitting though, they are confronted with with what the publisher chooses to put in front of them as a workflow and that can route people very quickly down avenues that are paid for. And I think that's going to be one of the challenges that we face going forward. If we are going to get to a point where we may be move away from read and publish deals but we still want to openly publish, you know, how, how are we going to be able to support our authors with the many publishers that they publish with? How are we going to make sure that we, we provide that appropriate guidance and support for all of those different workflows?

:: 16:41

And I've certainly spoke to a lot of colleagues that aren't that familiar with rights retention. I dunno if that's your experience as well? So they might not be yet aware of it, and I suppose, that's partly what this, hopefully this conversation is about trying to raise awareness with our colleagues at Leeds about what it is and why they need to be aware of it.

:: 17:10

I think one that comes to mind off the top of my head is the American Association for the Advancement of Science triple A S. , and they, they publish the journal Science which I think is one of the, the biggest hitters in the cross disciplinary field. And, uh, since Plan S was introduced in 2021, they've embraced the concept of zero embargo open access to all author accepted manuscripts, which I think has been a most, most welcome development.

And while I couldn't say that I've ever had sight of their financial statements, it obviously hasn't had a massive impact on their ability to continue to function and operate as a commercial publisher, which I think is a really important thing that we have got examples to give to academics when we're, when we're going to speak to them and doing that advocacy work. To say that as much as you may come across some big commercial publishers that perhaps are putting barriers in your way, there are people that are making it work. While I don't think we have a huge amount of sway over where academics are choosing to publish, I think it's important that we do highlight some of the good guys in our advocacy efforts.

:: 18:58

You know, this expectation perhaps that the, the currency of academia is to publish in certain journals with a certain journal impact factor, et cetera. And some of the questions around the Declaration of Research Assessments, so DORA that we are signatories to. Any thoughts from you, Jane, on how that might feed into this conversation?

:: 19:35

And I do think it must be very difficult for our, for our researchers because they're affiliated to a particular discipline. It is their life's work, isn't it? And being part of that discipline, part of that community of research, and often the journal is integral to that community or a set of journals are integral to that, that community.

So I think it's definitely a challenge and I'm not sure that there are easy answers to the challenge, but I do think we have to keep kind of engaging in conversation and finding ways in which we can move things forward in a way that enables us to work well with our academic colleagues.

:: 20:41

00:20:58 Jonathan Horne: This is, it's called the Open Access Support Fund, which was something that we launched early last year?

:: 21:10

00:21:11 Jonathan Horne: And it's... the aim and principle behind it is to try and support what will give a very sort of broad name to of open access or open initiatives which covers a huge array of things.

It could be publishing initiatives. It could be open tools such as the Directory of Open Access Journals. Any, anything and everything really that has got anything to do with Open, but with a very important caveat that it doesn't involve any author or reader facing charges. So I think we're trying to support collective funding models for these initiatives and try and move away from article process ing charges, book processing charges. I think some of the some of the models that I think that we've seen that have had problems in the past and, and perhaps contributed to the aforementioned delays or lack of progress to transitioning towards open access.

:: 22:08

00:22:29 Jane Saunders: Yeah, I mean, we very much want to keep the conversation going with colleagues across the institution, because the decisions that we make about the deals that we have with publishers, the access we give to content avenues for publishing, they have to be institutional decisions. They have to be owned by the institution. So it's essential that we work with colleagues across the institution. And I think, you know what Jonathan was saying there about the open access support fund is, and again, that conversation going back to the culture piece as well, is that we, you know, that there are lots of different ways aren't there of supporting open access?

And I think at the moment it's around experimenting, isn't it? And working with different opportunities that might present themselves. I mean, clearly we need to keep, you know, research impact, research visibility there, front and central. And we have things like the REF as well that are critical but we also need to, to be thinking about, well, what, what are the opportunities that might help us work, to generate that more open research culture? And I was really struck by something in the last podcast, actually, around rights retention where one of your colleagues on the call, Nick, , she talked about rights retention giving authors, giving universities the mechanisms to think about how you make your research visible and open. So giving you the control and the choice to be able to do that. And I think that's a really good thing to hold on to.

:: 24:08

I know exactly what you're talking about when Iva mentioned that. So that's a good way to sort of conclude and bring it back to that previous conversation with Jon and Iva. So thank you both very much and thanks for your time and I'll let you get off. Thank you.

:: 24:24

00:24:25 Jane Saunders: Thank you, Nick.

:: 24:28

Thanks for listening, and here's to you and your research culture.