ANR: Rights Retention Strategy

As of 2022, scientific publications resulting from research funded by the ANR must be published in HAL with immediate open access.

As part of the National Plan for Open Science and its Open Science policy, the French National Research Agency (ANR) has adopted a rights retention strategy that strengthens the academic freedom of researchers. Thanks to this system, authors can freely and legally disseminate the manuscript of their publications, before and after peer review.

The rights retention strategy is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funding agencies, that aims to accelerate the transition to immediate open access to scientific research results.

This approach will be mandatory for all projects funded by the ANR starting with the 2022 calls for proposals.

How do I comply?

  1. Add a Creative Commons CC-BY license to your manuscript, right at the submission stage to the editor. For example, you can add the following clickable text: "Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution ǀ 4.0 International licence" or specify "CC-BY" with the link to the page that describes the licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (alternatively use the logo that can be downloaded from the CC website). Alternatively, you can use the Chooser webtool to generate a text that you can copy and paste into your manuscript.
     
  2. Inform your publisher that you have added a CC-BY license to your Accepted Manuscript for Publication (AAM)*, as required by the ANR. The following statement must be included in the cover letter accompanying the submission and in the acknowledgments of the article:

    "This research was funded, in whole or in part, by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), grant ANR-nn-XXXX-nnnn. A CC BY license is applied to the AAM resulting from this submission, in accordance with  the open access conditions of the grant."
     
  3. Once the article is accepted, you can immediately deposit your Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) in HAL: don't forget to fill in the "License" ("CC-BY") and ANR (ANR-nn-XXXX-nnnn) fields in the user deposit form.
*Optionally, you can deposit your manuscript in HAL with a CC-BY license before submitting it to the editor, in order to associate the CC open license with your research upstream. In this case, select the document type "preprint" in HAL.


See the FAQ Publications de l'ANR and the following instructions "Mettre en œuvre la stratégie de non-cession des droits sur les publications scientifiques"

What are the benefits?

  • You do not pay open access publication fees (APC).
  • Your publication will be published immediately and openly without embargo.
  • Your publication is accessible to all, without any journal subscription requirements or consultation fees (paywall).
  • The CC-BY license allows widespread sharing and redistribution without restrictions (you just have to credit the authors).
  Did you know? The CC-BY license attached to articles also allows authors to reuse parts of their published articles (figures, photos, tables) without having to ask the publishers for permission.

What if the publisher refuses the rights retention?

  • You can let them know that using the RRS is required through a pre-signed contract (the Project Funding Agreement)
  • You can report the publisher's rejection to your funding agency and to the university's Open Science team (see contacts opposite).