Adopting and managing institutional rights retention policies

About the project

Rights retention and the implementation of local policies is an opportunity for the sector to challenge the existing paradigm. Our institutional rights retention policy (IRRP) support project will create validated and prioritised use cases that represent sector pain points for IRRP adoption. This will clearly identify where Jisc should play a role in this space.

Why is this needed?

This project aims to translate anecdotal need for resources into a clear description of where Jisc could play a role in this space. It will provide evidence of whether or not to support funding for further development.

Supporting IRRPs aligns with Jisc’s business purposes including our commitment to:

• Support open access publishing through the repository deposit route
• Develop forward-looking sector requirements that advance open research
• Empowering communities and encouraging conversations

What have we done so far?

We have created a public problem space for the sector to comment. The problem space statements are intended to inform and shape use cases. They will do this by identifying areas where UK HEIs are already experiencing challenges or envisage difficulties around institutional rights retention policy matters.

If you would like access to the problem space, please email licensing@jisc.ac.uk with RRS in the email title.

We held a series of online focus groups to give UK HEIs the opportunity to contribute so that draft use cases could be refined and prioritised to reflect sector needs. The resulting validated and prioritised use cases will inform decisions on whether to proceed further with the preparation and provision of support resources.

Next steps

We will encourage and enable member higher education institutions who have already instigated IRRPs to:

• Share best practice around implementing an IRRP with other HEIs wishing to develop a similar approach, for example, briefing papers, drafts of letters to publishers, lists of publisher email and postal addresses to progress sector collaboration
• Join the digital research community group to share experiences of institutional adoption, briefings to senate or university boards and practical issues with the wider research community

We will explore a range of options for support and monitoring mechanisms with our content expert group.