Midlands Innovation Rights Retention Statement promotes transparent and inclusive research
The eight Midlands Innovation universities have collectively adopted and published a Rights Retention Statement of Intent to and create a more ‘transparent, inclusive and democratic’ research and innovation ecosystem.
The Midlands Innovation partnership is home to 16,000 academic staff, 2,000 technical staff and more than 130,000 students. 10% of total UKRI research grants and contracts are awarded to MI universities at a value of £223m and in 2022, over 27,000 publications involved an author from one of our institutions.
This new statement outlines a united approach, taken by the eight institutions, to support its research community and maintain the author’s intellectual property and ownership when an academic’s research is published.
The statement has been founded on the UNESCO principles for ‘making science more accessible, inclusive and equitable for the benefit of all’ and UKRI’s belief that research should be ‘as open as possible’ and can be viewed here.
Rights Retention plays a key role in ensuring authors keep the rights to their work, not having them automatically transferred to publishers.
Midlands Innovation’s Rights Retention Statement of Intent statement strongly recommends that researchers do not, by default, transfer intellectual property rights to publishers and instead use a Rights Retention statement as standard practice.
Professor Daniel Parsons, Pro Vice-Chanceller of Research and Innovation for Loughborough University commented on behalf of the MI partnership.
He said: “I very much welcome this new approach to publishing that moves away from our academics ceding rights to their intellectual property to publishers by default in the publication process.
“This is important as it ensures that research is fully open access and that the outcomes of the work are democratised and as widely available as possible to stakeholders and the public.
“Our decision to collectively adopt an aligned approach to rights retention, is an important values-based set of actions that will benefit our academy and our collective research environment and culture.”
Rights Retention helps authors and institutions meet funder requirements, and supports the wider sector move through transitional deals towards a fully open scholarly communications infrastructure.
Innovative publishers are already supporting the development of Open Research, and Midlands Innovation encourages and supports this best practice approach.
Midlands Innovation has joined a growing number of universities in the UK taking a stance on the importance of researchers being able to retain their Intellectual Property Rights when their work is published.
