Copyright retention has been at the core of Plan S since its inception. Its first principle is that authors or their institutions retain copyright to their work. The Rights Retention Strategy aims to ensure that authors retain their rights and comply with funders´ mandates of immediate open access under open licenses while publishing in the venue of their choice.
cOAlition S welcomes the various rights retention strategies adopted by research funders and institutions, as well as efforts to improve copyright legislation for research. These include the introduction of Secondary Publication Rights in national copyright legislation, and the European Research Area policy work to identify barriers to access to and reuse of scientific publications in EU copyright legislation and propose legislative and non-legislative measures.
cOAlition S is also supportive of exploring an EU Secondary Publication Right, advancing towards sustainable universal open access on an international scale, e.g. statutory licensing, and suggestions for mandatory clauses for scientific publishing agreements via contract law, mandatory reversion rights, EU harmonisation of first ownership, and mandatory and stronger exceptions and limitations for research (see: https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/891665 and https://zenodo.org/record/7148721).
