Rights Retention

Immediate open access depends on authors retaining sufficient rights to share the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) upon acceptance. Without rights retention, publisher terms can block or delay open repository access through embargoes or restrictive licences. Rights retention ensures your AAM can be made openly available straight away under a permissive licence such as Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), supporting access, reuse, and collaboration while you keep copyright.

Our approach at University of Galway

Under the University of Galway Research Publishing Policy, you retain copyright and grant the publisher a licence to publish. The University also has a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide licence from staff to make research publications publicly available under an open licence, such as a Creative Commons licence. This provides a consistent basis for immediate repository access to eligible AAMs.

To make this work smoothly, the Library proactively notifies publishers. Once a publisher has been notified, authors and repository staff can rely on the institutional policy without case-by-case negotiation. Repository staff can apply CC BY to eligible AAMs submitted after the notification date, including where a publisher’s standard terms refer to an embargo.

Publishers notified

The Library has notified the publishers listed below of the Research Publishing Policy. For manuscripts submitted after the date shown, the University of Galway Research Repository can make the AAM open access immediately on acceptance with a CC BY licence.

What authors should do when submitting

If your publisher is on the notified list, you do not need to include a rights retention statement for the policy to apply. The Library has already notified these publishers that eligible AAMs can be made open in the University of Galway Research Repository under CC BY on acceptance.

We still encourage authors to include a rights retention statement where practical, because it can reduce confusion during submission and helps make your intention explicit. This is a flexible approach. If your submission system does not make it easy to add a statement, or you prefer not to, the policy notice remains the primary mechanism.

Suggested rights retention statement (recommended)
“For the purpose of open availability, the author has applied a public copyright licence to the Author Accepted Manuscript arising from this submission to enable immediate repository dissemination.”

If the publisher is not listed

If you are considering submitting a manuscript to a publisher who is not listed here, please contact openanddigitalresearch@universityofgalway.ie before you submit your manuscript. We will notify them on your behalf and add them to the list.

Help with questions or publisher queries

If a publisher raises questions about rights retention or repository deposit, email openanddigitalresearch@universityofgalway.ie and include any relevant correspondence.