CORE recently introduced the Rights Retention Statements tracker to the CORE Dashboard, and it is now available to CORE members. An increasing number of UK institutions have implemented an institutional rights retention policy, specifying rights for publications for all articles (and sometimes books) with a specific publisher. There is a useful map of these institutions here. Once a policy is in place, the majority of articles will probably not have a rights statement within each article. However, even with an institutional agreement in place, there are cases when it is important to check the text.
Here is an example of a high-level institutional rights retention agreement, from the University of St Andrews:
The Rights Retention (RR) statement ensures full transparency for co-authors and the publisher. Note. For many research funders the RR statement is a requirement for Rights Retention, but for the University of St Andrews Open Access policy it is a strong recommendation only, as rights are retaining by default as part of core University IP policy.
Additionally, some authors will include specific statements within the text of a single article that state what rights are available. These statements may or may not correspond with the institution policy, so it is important for the repository manager to identify them where they exist. CORE has developed for this purpose a rights-retention statement checker. To be specific, this tool is to help managers make the best of an imperfect world. Ideally, all papers would follow the publisher-wide agreement, which would eliminate the need for any manual intervention at the individual journal level, but researchers and publishers do not always follow the agreed policy. Using the CORE dashboard, repository managers can see if a paper includes any statement relating to rights retention. The tool uses machine learning methods to identify any text in an article, wherever it appears (in the abstract, or in the full text) that describes any potential rights retention statements. The CORE RRS tracker does not check those rights; it simply alerts you that the article states something relating to rights, and enables the repository manager to validate the details.
The CORE Rights Retention Statement tracker – part of the CORE Dashboard.
The CORE rights retention tracking tool can work alongside an institution-wide rights retention policy, since some authors will still choose to put their own rights information within an article.
Without the CORE RRS tracker, repository staff might not notice that within a single article there might be some text that may contradict the organisational policy. Jackie Proven, Repository Manager at St Andrews commented; “It will be useful to locate and then review any specific rights statements via CORE. We will be able to track how our rights retention policy is being interpreted.”
We are now working in partnership with CORE members to further develop and enhance this technology, do get in touch if you’d like to provide feedback or have suggestions for how CORE can continue to develop effective tools for repositories.
Until next time…