Research support

Teesside University Rights Retention Policy 

For submissions from the 1st September 2025 Teesside University has introduced an institutional rights retention policy. Under this policy Teesside University staff and doctoral students are required to publish the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) of their journal article or conference proceeding on TeesRep under a CC-BY licence.

It is important that if you are funded that you review your funder's policy as many have their own rights retention requirements.

To learn more about the policy and how this affects you please attend our ENRICH IRRP session and attend a drop-in (in person or online). 

Normally, you would lose the right to disseminate your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) during your publication journey. Although you automatically hold the copyright when you write a paper, if you publish it via a route that is not OA, you may be asked to sign a publishing agreement in which you give all or part of your rights to the publisher, who now holds them exclusively. In practice, this means that you cannot use your own work without explicit written permission from the publisher. While the publisher will retain their rights to the VOR, by asserting your rights and applying a CC-BY licence you will be able to disseminate the AAM as you see fit.

This has the additional benefit of allowing you to publish in venues where licence or embargo restrictions would make the VOR non-compliant with OA requirements from funders or for policies such as the REF, as the AAM can be made open access in line with these requirements.

More information

Please listen to Episode 1 of The Buttery Sessions podcast for an introduction to the policy. 

The policy applies to the submission of journal articles or conference proceedings (which are published under an ISSN) from the 1st September 2025 by Teesside University authors or co-authors who are members of staff or doctoral students.

If you are working with co-authors based elsewhere, they need to be aware of, and agree to, the Rights Retention position at Teesside University.

In order to retain your rights the below Rights Retention Statement should be included in either the funding/ acknowledgement section or in the first footnote or endnote and in any cover letter/note of all papers submitted from September 1st 2025.

‘For the purpose of open access, the author(s) has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.’

Alternative wording, with the same intended outcome can be used instead, if required by a relevant funder.

To comply with OA requirements, upon acceptance for publication you will need to deposit the (AAM) of your paper into TeesRep.

On the date of  publication the full-text of the AAM will be made public on TeesRep under the CC-BY licence.

If compliance isn't possible, for example, there is not agreement from all authors or there are copyright concerns over third party content, then it may be possible to apply a partial or complete opt-out, to the manuscript. Be aware that this may mean that the output is not compliant with funder or REF policies.

Email libraryhelp@tees.ac.uk