Open Access

Edinburgh Napier University has a new policy to give the university and authors more rights over their work - the Research Publications and Open Access Policy. This comes into effect from 1 Aug 2025. It has been designed to enable the University to disseminate its research and scholarship as widely as possible, while enabling its staff to meet research funder open access requirements and still publish their work in a journal of their choice. 

Like many UK universities, we have introduced a 'rights retention' aspect to the open access policy, aligning with sector-wide efforts across the UK to enhance open access to research. By asserting the university’s right to make copies of research outputs immediately available in Worktribe with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, we gain more control over research outputs. Authors themselves then retain copyright to their work.

Edinburgh Napier University members of staff and postgraduate research students own the copyright to their scholarly publications. Upon acceptance of publication each researcher agrees to grant Edinburgh Napier University a non‐exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide licence to make manuscripts of their scholarly articles publicly available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

This will be done through the repository. So authors can continue to add their new publications to Worktribe as usual, and the library's repository team will make sure the right license is applied to the right file.

This policy does not extend to other Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in research, which is already covered in the University’s IP Policy.

For further details, see Research Publications and Open Access Policy or Frequently Asked Questions.

If you require any further information, please contact the repository team at repository@napier.ac.uk.

• This policy applies to all University staff and Postgraduate Research students.
• The policy applies to all scholarly articles, including journal articles and conference proceedings, authored or co-authored while the researcher is affiliated with ENU.
• We can only apply the policy to publications where we have previously notified the publisher of the new policy. The university has contacted over 100 publishers so far, covering around 95% of publications. Authors are not required to contact publishers themselves - the Library will check whether we have notified a particular publisher.
• The policy does not apply to monographs and other long-form publications, book chapters, creative outputs, datasets, or other outputs that are not scholarly articles, unless this is mandated by a funder. However, the University strongly encourages researchers to make them as openly available as possible.