Creative Licences with Creative Commons

To enable open research, an infrastructure has to exist to support it. Some of this comes in the form of funding, some of it in the form of repositories and web standards, as well as things like persistent identifiers, and some of it is having a route to grant people permission to reuse released materials.

Most outputs from research will enjoy copyright, an intellectual property right that exists to ensure that the creator(s) of a work receive financial and moral rewards for the effort they have put into creating things. The downside of copyright is that it limits what other people can do with a work, regardless of their reason for doing so. A number of exceptions exist to copyright law, but they tend to hinge on meeting an idea of fair dealing that requires the person reusing the material takes on some risk in doing so.

So in order for research to be truly open, it is important to licence the work as this lays out what uses are permitted by the creator.

There are many licencing schemes out there, but the most pervasive is Creative Commons, which is used on both physical and digital journal articles, books and book chapters, videos, photographs and other images, sound recordings and more (although not software, for good reasons). It is an internationally recognized scheme which means that you don’t have to worry too much about the copyright law in other countries! And it is used by most publishers for their open access offer, so it’s worth understanding.

Creative Commons is easy to understand and use. It works by stacking restrictions on top of a basic permissive licence which only requires that users attribute the creator(s) of the original work in their reuse.

The basic CC BY licence permits downloading, copying, sharing, adapting and commercial use of a work. Adaptations could include translations or shifting material to another format.

If you don’t want people to be able to adapt the work, simply add a No Derivatives restriction to the licence and get a CC BY-ND licence.

If you don’t want people to be able to make money off your work, add a Non Commercial restriction and you have a CC BY-NC licence.

From there you can then stack both restrictions to create a CC BY-NC-ND licence. No derivatives and no commercial use.

Or, if you’re happy for people to create derivatives but don’t want the derivatives to be shared on a different licence, you could add a share alike restriction, leading to either a CC BY-SA or a CC BY-NC-SA, depending on how generous you want to be.

Licences are intended to make reuse quicker and easier, without giving up your copyright, and saving you time in terms of having to respond to permission requests. If someone wants to reuse your work in a way that the licence doesn’t allow, they can still reach out to you for permissions.