July 16, 2020. – The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) welcomes the announcement by cOAlition S of its new Rights Retention Strategy.
Under this strategy, research funding agencies that participate in cOAlition S – the international consortium of national research funders and charitable foundations advancing open access under Plan S – will “require that a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) is applied to all Author Accepted Manuscripts (AAMs) or Versions of Record (VoR) reporting original research, supported in whole or in part by their funding.”
CARL believes that scholarly authors should retain copyright in their work, and not enter into exclusive publishing agreements which restrict what they can do with their research findings. This was the basis for our work to adapt SPARC’s Authors Addendum for use by Canadian authors, and in offering scholars guidance on author rights. We believe that a funder-mandated approach such as this strategy is an important and positive step forward: it gives authors freedom to publish in the venue of their choice while also enabling immediate open access, without putting the onus on individual authors to negotiate such rights.
As an organization committed to the successful implementation and networking of library-managed repositories to maximize access to scholarship, CARL is pleased that this strategy provides an easy and direct route for funder Open Access policy compliance via deposit into institutional or subject repositories. CARL hopes this strategy will contribute to redefining rights norms within scholarly publishing worldwide.
CARL is the voice of Canada’s research libraries. The Association’s members include Canada’s twenty-nine largest university libraries and two federal institutions. Enhancing research and higher education are at the heart of its mission. CARL develops the capacity to support this mission, promotes effective and sustainable scholarly communication, and advocates for public policy that enables broad access to scholarly information. CARL is on the web at www.carl-abrc.ca.
For more information, please contact:
Susan Haigh, Executive Director
(613) 482-9344 ext. 101
