Rights Retention Strategy (RRS)

A compliance mechanism, developed by cOAlition S in 2020, under which a funded researcher asserts a CC BY (or CC BY-equivalent) licence over the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) at the point of submission -- typically via a standard statement in the cover letter, on the manuscript's first page, or in the acknowledgements -- rather than negotiating open-access rights with the publisher after acceptance. Because the author (via their funder's grant conditions) retained the necessary rights from the outset, the publisher's own copyright transfer agreement, embargo policy, or self-archiving terms cannot override the licence already applied. An instance qualifies as RRS only if the licence statement is made at submission, before any publisher agreement is signed; a rights claim asserted only after acceptance, or general institutional self-archiving without a prior funder-mandated statement, does not count.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 23 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A UKRI-funded author submitting to a subscription journal includes UKRI's standard rights-retention statement ('...a CC BY public copyright licence is applied to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission') in the cover letter, so the AAM can be deposited with zero embargo under UKRI's policy (effective for submissions from 1 April 2022) regardless of the publisher's own self-archiving embargo.

Is an instance

A cOAlition S-funded researcher submits to a hybrid journal whose default self-archiving policy imposes a 12-month embargo. Because the required CC BY statement was added to the manuscript at submission, not negotiated afterward, the author remains Plan S-compliant even though the publisher never changed its general policy.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

A researcher signs a publisher's standard copyright transfer agreement after acceptance without having included any submission-time rights statement. The publisher's own embargo and licensing terms apply in full; this is ordinary green open access, not RRS.

Not an instance

An author deposits the AAM in an institutional repository after publication, relying only on the publisher's routine self-archiving policy, with no funder-mandated licence statement made at submission. Compliance depends entirely on whatever embargo the publisher allows, which is exactly the dependency RRS is designed to remove.

The Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) is a mechanism developed by cOAlition S in 2020 to let researchers funded by a Plan S-aligned funder submit to the journal of their choice — including subscription journals — while still guaranteeing immediate open-access compliance. It works by moving the point at which open-access rights are secured from after acceptance to before submission.

How it works

Under the conventional route, an author submits a manuscript, it is accepted, and only then does a publisher’s copyright transfer or licensing agreement determine what the author is allowed to do with it — including whether, and after how long an embargo, the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) can be deposited in a repository under an open licence.

RRS reverses that sequence. Because the researcher’s funder requires it as a condition of the grant, the author includes a standard statement at the point of submission — commonly on the manuscript’s first page, in the cover letter, or in the acknowledgements — asserting that a CC BY (or CC BY-equivalent) licence will apply to the AAM. A widely used form of this statement, based on the wording cOAlition S and adopting funders publish, reads approximately: ‘For the purpose of Open Access, a CC BY public copyright licence is applied to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.’ Because the licence is asserted as a condition attached to the funded research itself, before any agreement with the publisher exists, a later publisher copyright transfer agreement cannot retroactively remove it — the author never had exclusive rights left to sign away for that version.

Why it exists

Before RRS, funders wanting immediate, no-embargo open access effectively had to require publication in a fully open-access venue, a compliant repository route, or a transformative agreement — routes that could exclude subscription journals a researcher might otherwise prefer for disciplinary or career reasons. RRS was designed to remove that trade-off: it makes green open access (repository deposit of the AAM) usable for full compliance without depending on whether a given publisher’s self-archiving policy happens to allow a short or zero embargo. cOAlition S has described the strategy explicitly as intended to safeguard researchers’ own intellectual ownership of their manuscripts and to counter unreasonable publisher embargo periods.

Adoption beyond cOAlition S

The mechanism has been adopted well beyond cOAlition S’s own membership. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) built a rights-retention statement requirement into its open access policy for peer-reviewed research articles and conference papers submitted from 1 April 2022, requiring immediate (non-embargoed) AAM deposit under a CC BY or other permitted licence for authors following the green route. Other Plan S-aligned and non-member funders have published similar guidance, and institutions increasingly recommend the statement as standard practice for grant-funded submissions regardless of which specific funder mandates it.

Publisher response

The strategy has not been adopted by publishers without friction. Some publishers and learned societies have disputed authors’ ability to apply a rights-retention statement that runs ahead of the publisher’s own copyright agreement, and cOAlition S has published guidance addressing what it has characterised as publisher equivocation on the point. Authors following RRS are generally advised to keep the statement in place through peer review and resist pressure to remove it as a condition of publication, since removing it would forfeit the compliance route the funder requires.

Related terms

Plan S — the funder open-access policy RRS was built to support
cOAlition S — the funder consortium that developed and maintains RRS guidance
Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) — the manuscript version RRS licenses
Green open access — the repository-deposit route RRS makes fully compliant
Embargo — the publisher-imposed delay RRS is designed to make irrelevant to compliance
Transformative agreement — an alternative Plan S compliance route

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

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      vocab-term="Rights Retention Strategy (RRS)"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/rights-retention-strategy" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

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