Creative Commons licences

Copyright

Making material open access (OA) does not deprive copyright holders of any rights. It requires the consent of copyright holders and copyright laws still apply. Adding a licence to your work permits users to make use of your material in various ways, but only under certain conditions and with proper attribution to the original source.

Creative Commons (CC) have developed a series of licences for the differing access and re-use wishes of copyright owners. You can select the type of licence that best suits your needs.

The Licences and Creative Commons section of Intellectual property and copyright explains more about copyright and CC licences.

Benefits of CC licences

A Creative Commons licence can:

  • promote the sharing and visibility of your work
  • clearly communicate any limited copy and dissemination rights where you want to retain maximum control, for example, over a commercially produced copyright work
  • protect your work from mangled or misattributed copies or commercial re-use.

Assigning a CC licence

  1. Choose which licence you want to use. 
  2. Use CC tools to create the icon, acknowledgement, and licence description suitable for your chosen licence. 
  3.  Copy the icon and other automatically generated CC licence details into your work. 

Examples of CC licences

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence. 

©2014 Smith et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited.