Creative Commons licenses
Answer
What are Creative Commons licenses?
Open Access research outputs, including journal articles, conference proceedings and books, are typically made available under a Creative Commons license. These licenses specify what people can and can’t do with Open Access content, and there are seven different licence types to reflect the various ways that research can or should be reused.
You can find out about all seven of the licenses via the Creative Commons website.
The most commonly-used license is the Creative Commons Attribution License (or CC BY). This license allows people to ‘distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator’. Activities such as text mining, translation, and dissemination become much easier where content is made available under a CC BY license.
Using Creative Commons licenses
Many research funders, including UKRI and The Wellcome Trust, require application of the CC BY license to Open Access content which acknowledges the funding organisation. The University’s Rights Retention Position means that a CC BY license is applied to journal articles made Open Access via the University’s Current Research Information System, Pure.
If you’re unsure about which license to select, or would like to discuss your options further, please get in touch.
More information
You can access the Library’s copyright and research guide for more advice on copyright issues for researchers.
Further support
Need any help? You can find more articles about other Open Access-related topics or get in touch with the team.