Questions and Answers

When you submit an article to a traditional journal, you typically assign the copyright to the publisher by signing the copyright transfer agreement. When you publish in an Open Access journal you retain the copyright.

Open Access articles are published under public copyright licenses (such as Creative Commons licenses), which means that you retain the copyright and indicate (by way of license) what others are allowed to do with the article.

If the publisher has placed restrictions on the sharing of the work, authors should make use of the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS). The RRS enables researchers to retain sufficient intellectual ownership rights on their work to make the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) or Version of Record (VoR) Open Access at the time of publication (no embargoes) with a CC-BY license or equivalent. The RRS allows authors to share their work immediately after publication and under a CC-BY license. In order to make use of the RRS, researchers must indicate to the publisher upon submission of publication that they are bound by a 'previous contract' from a funder.