Research Publishing (Open Access)

The university has adopted a Rights Retention Policy as part of the updated Research Publishing: Open Access Policy 2025. This approach ensures that UHI authors keep the rights they need to share their research outputs openly, while remaining compliant with funder and REF requirements.

Rights retention allows you, as an author, to keep key rights over the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) of your work instead of assigning all rights exclusively to a publisher. By keeping these rights, you can deposit your AAM in PURE and make it openly available, under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, even if the journal itself is not fully open access.

For every manuscript submitted to a journal or book publisher, UHI authors are expected to include a Rights Retention Statement. This should appear in the funding acknowledgement section of the manuscript and in any cover letter or submission note to the publisher.

“This research output is subject to UHI’s Open Access and Rights Retention Policy, which grants the institution a non-exclusive right to make the Author Accepted Manuscript openly available upon acceptance.”

or

“For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission”

If you are not the corresponding author, you should ensure that the corresponding author includes the Rights Retention Statement on submission. If co‑authors have concerns, please contact the Open Access officer for advice.

To comply with the policy, UHI authors should:

• Include the Rights Retention Statement in all manuscript submissions to journals and book publishers.
• Deposit the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in PURE as soon as the output is accepted, providing full bibliographic details and the correct version.
• Apply a CC BY licence to the AAM unless you have been advised to use a different licence by the Research Office.
• Record any publisher embargo period in PURE. As a general rule, UHI regards six months as the maximum acceptable embargo. Any longer periods require approval from the Dean of Research and Innovation.
• Check funder policies (for example via Sherpa tools) to ensure you also meet specific funder open access requirements.

If you experience any resistance from publishers, please contact the Open Access Officer. In some cases, you may have to consider publishing in an alternative publication. 

In most cases, UHI expects authors to follow the Rights Retention Policy. However, there may occasionally be situations where you cannot apply the Rights Retention Statement, for example because of third‑party copyright restrictions, security or confidentiality issues, or a funder‑mandated alternative route.

If you believe you need an exception, you must contact the Research Office and the Open Access team at the earliest opportunity. Requests are considered by the Dean of Research and Innovation, who will consult with Library and Governance colleagues. Authors cannot opt out of depositing the accepted manuscript in PURE, even where an exception to the Rights Retention Statement is granted.

The Library Service, Research Office and Governance work together to support UHI authors in applying the Rights Retention Policy. If you are unsure how to use the Rights Retention Statement, how it interacts with a particular publisher’s contract, or how to record your output in PURE, please contact the Open Access team at: openaccess@uhi.ac.uk