The conversation around open access often fixates on Article Processing Charges (APCs) and publisher business models. But there’s a quieter, more fundamental lever being pulled in the background: rights retention. It’s not a flashy policy; it’s an infrastructural one. At its core, rights retention is about shifting the default in scholarly publishing from asking permission to granting it. This subtle recalibration is proving to be the indispensable foundation for a truly sustainable open access ecosystem, one that doesn’t just add a new tollbooth but rewires the entire road.

From Licensing to Liberating: The Power of the Default

Traditionally, the standard publishing agreement asks authors to transfer their copyright. To share their own work openly later, they must seek the publisher’s approval, often navigating embargoes or paying fees. Rights retention policies, like those pioneered by Plan S funders such as UKRI and the Wellcome Trust, flip this script. They mandate that grantees retain key rights—specifically, the right to immediately deposit the Author’s Accepted Manuscript in a repository under a Creative Commons license—before signing any publisher contract. This isn’t a negotiation; it’s a non-negotiable precondition of funding.

The genius here is in the default setting. By securing these rights upfront, the policy creates a permanent, legally sound open copy that exists independently of the publisher’s version of record. It transforms open access from a hopeful outcome into a guaranteed, embedded feature of the research lifecycle. Think of it as building a public park into the blueprint of a new neighborhood, rather than hoping a developer might donate land later.

Sustainability Beyond the Budget Line

When we talk about “sustainable” OA, the immediate thought is financial: who pays the APCs? Rights retention addresses a deeper, more systemic form of sustainability. It builds resilience and diversity into the knowledge supply chain.

First, it decouples preservation and access from commercial viability. A paper in a journal that ceases operations, or locked behind a subscription that a library can no longer afford, is effectively lost if the publisher holds the only key. A rights-retained copy in an institutional or disciplinary repository, however, persists. These repositories, often run by universities or communities, have a mission of stewardship, not profit. They represent a distributed, fail-safe network for scholarly output, ensuring that knowledge isn’t held hostage to a single entity’s fortunes.

Second, it mitigates the “author-pays” equity crisis. A gold OA model reliant on APCs inherently advantages well-funded researchers and institutions in the Global North. Rights retention, by enabling immediate green OA, creates a parallel, equitable access route. A researcher anywhere in the world can access the accepted manuscript for free, regardless of their institution’s budget or the author’s ability to pay an APC. This isn’t a workaround; it’s a legitimate, policy-driven channel that normalizes open sharing as a core academic practice, not a premium add-on.

The Ripple Effect: Changing Publisher Behavior

The impact isn’t passive. Widespread adoption of rights retention policies creates a powerful market signal. When major funders representing billions in research dollars insist on these terms, publishers are forced to adapt. We’re already seeing this: many publishers have updated their policies to explicitly accommodate these funder mandates, creating “compliant” pathways that were unthinkable a decade ago. It moves the Overton window of what a standard publishing contract can look like. The goal isn’t to destroy the publishing industry, but to reform it from a position of collective strength, aligning publisher services with the fundamental need for open, preserved scholarship.

The Infrastructure of Autonomy

Ultimately, rights retention is about scholarly autonomy. It returns a measure of control to the academic community over the fruits of its labor. It empowers authors, strengthens the role of institutional repositories, and validates the library’s function as a curator of local intellectual capital, not just a consumer of external content. This shift builds a more balanced ecosystem where multiple, interoperable nodes—publishers, repositories, archives—coexist, each playing to its strengths.

Without this legal and policy groundwork, efforts to build open access remain precarious, vulnerable to market shifts and access gaps. With it, we lay the foundation for a system where openness is the default, preservation is assured, and equity is engineered into the design. The role of rights retention, then, is that of a keystone: it’s the unglamorous, load-bearing element that makes the entire arch of sustainable open access stand.