NEWS
The national library consortium Bibsam is working to reduce reliance on hybrid publishing and promote publishing in fully open access journals, as well as alternative models for open access.
One outcome of Bibsam’s action plan has been the working groups established in spring 2026 to investigate alternatives to dependence on hybrid publishing. One of these working groups focused on rights retention measures.
The aim of rights retention measures is to ensure that authors retain rights to their publications. Traditionally, publishers have used agreements under which researchers transfer the rights to their work to the publisher through a Copyright Transfer Agreement. This has meant not only that readers often have to pay to access publications, but also that researchers have lost opportunities to use and share their own work.
What are rights retention measures?
Rights retention means that researchers retain the right to make the accepted version of their manuscript openly available, regardless of the publishing agreement they later enter into with a publisher. The accepted manuscript is the version that incorporates all changes resulting from peer review but has not yet been formatted according to the publisher’s layout. Most researchers who have applied rights retention measures so far have done so under a policy introduced by a research funder or higher education institution.
Johanna Österåker, who works with scholarly publishing support at Umeå University Library and was also a member of Bibsam’s working group on rights retention measures, says:
“The purpose of rights retention strategies is to ensure that researchers can freely choose where to publish while still meeting funders’ open access requirements through self-archiving.”
She notes that a closely related example of a rights retention strategy is the Prior Licensing Model, which Finnish higher education institutions introduced in 2026.
