Frequently Asked Questions on Creative Commons
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UK FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ON CREATIVE COMMONS & OPEN ACCESS V.0.1 This information guide contains questions and responses to common concerns surrounding Open Access, Creative Commons, and the publication of research. It is intended to aid researchers, teachers, librarians, administrators and many others using and encountering the Open Access movement in their work. What is Open Access? How should I licence my work for the purposes of Open Access? Open Access is the movement to make research and knowledge freely available The answer to this depends on the type through the internet for public reuse. of content you make available. Ultimate- Open Access means: “free, irrevocable, world- ly, it is your choice, as you hold the copy- wide, perpetual right of access to, and a license right in your work and are legally entitled to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the to decide how it may be used. work publicly and to make and distribute deriva- If you work for an educational institution, you tive works, in any digital medium for any respon- should first check with your research director sible purpose, subject to proper attribution of and library if you intend to publish material authorship.” that you might later submit for peer-reviewed For more information on the definition of ‘Open publication. Your institution may already have Access’, see the Berlin Declaration, Bethesda an Open Access publishing policy for you to Statement on Open Access Publishing, and consult, and your library will be able to help you Budapest Open Access Initiative. decide how to best proceed. However, if the content is of less formal nature, What are the benefits of Open like slides, a video, classroom material, or a web- Access? site resource, or if you intend to self-publish, we recommend using the CC BY licence. By applying There are many benefits to Open Access. CC BY, you enable everyone to freely reuse the your research as they see fit, so long as they Open Access allows research to be disseminat- attribute you as the source of the information. ed more quickly and widely, translating faster into measurable effects on organisations, institutions, and the general public. CC BY LICENCE, ‘ATTRIBUTION’ It also enables the research process to operate LOGO more efficiently and leads to increased scholar- ly citations and greater use and understanding of research. Finally, open access benefits society by en- abling those outside of your research sector, like teachers, lawyers, students, and medical professionals, to access your findings and keep Should you require a more restrictive licence, up-to-date with the latest developments. Creative Commons has a useful tool to help you determine the licence best for you. 1¬ I’m uncomfortable with others What happens if I use ‘Share Alike’ using my research for commercial (SA) licensed material in my work? purposes. Should I use a non-com- Does that mean I have to make my mercial licence for my dataset? work available under the same SA licence? We recommend you avoid using a non-commercial licence. Here’s why: Not necessarily, but it depends on how Keep in mind the Open Access definition does you use the SA licensed content. not accommodate non-commercial restrictions. A ‘Share Alike’ CC licence applies only to the Accordingly, using a CC BY-NC licence will not content licensed as SA that you have used. It qualify as Open Access. This view is also taken does not require you to also make your work by Creative Commons, which indicates that CC available under a SA licence, so long as you have licences combined with NC (non-commercial) not combined the independent works into one or ND (no derivatives) conditions are not ‘free new work (known as a ‘derivative’ work). culture.’ When using SA content in your work, be sure to I want to CC licence my work, but maintain the SA licensing information in regards to the content used. This can be done by pro- I’m concerned because it contains viding the SA licensing information next to the copyright protected material content in your work and by designating it as SA made available by others that I cit- when listing the other restricted content in your rights statement. ed or quoted. Will this affect their copyright? For example, if you include a CC BY-SA chapter in your anthology, you do not have to licence the Your CC licence applies only to your entire anthology as CC BY-SA, but the CC BY-SA original contributions and does not chapter must retain the original licence. Similar- supersede any rights retained by authors ly, if you use a deck of slides under CC BY-SA in whose works you have cited or have per- your course, you do not have to licence your en- tire course under CC BY-SA, but the slides must mission to use. retain the original licence. However, if you create This concern is quite common, especially with a new song by remixing two existing songs, publications, and it comes with a pretty stand- one of which belongs to you and the other is ard solution. The best approach is to provide a licensed under a CC BY-SA, then the new work (a rights statement explaining that except where derivative work) must be licensed CC BY-SA. it is otherwise noted, your work is licenced un- We understand that might be confusing, so der the appropriate CC licence. You should also here’s an illustration to help: identify clearly the content that is not under the CC licence and subject to restrictions. It is good practice to provide that information NAVIGATING MULTIPLE LICENCES next to the restricted content. This will signal AND MAINTAINING RIGHTS INFO to others what content within the publication is not covered by your CC licence, who retains the rights, and where they can go to licence their own use. For example, this is customary in INTRO TO COPYRIGHT scientific writing; in cases of citations or quo- YOUR NAME, © 2017 tations this is usually identified with standard • indications (quotations, italics, etc.) and proper- • • ly attributed to the original sources (usually in a © footnote or end note with the proper reference IMAGE, CC BY-SA • to the source). • • The Getty Institute uses this system when pub- YOUR NAME CITATION lishing digital editions under Creative Commons AND RIGHTS FOR IMAGE licences, and they provide examples for how INFO AND CC to best do this here. To see how the Institute LICENCE applies this in practice, go here. 2¬ I’m really concerned with attribu- Like Germany, the French law applies to articles tion. How can I make sure others produced during research receiving at least 50% of funding from public funds, yet the cite me as the source for my re- periodical only need be published at least once search? a year. The French law also makes a distinction between articles written for science, tech- Attribution is a genuine concern. To help nology and medicine and articles written for others cite your research, include a humanities and social sciences: the former may citation in your research that users can be made available after a period of six months; copy and paste to give you credit for your the latter may be made available after twelve hard work. months. In any case, the open access version cannot be used for further commercial publish- This citation might appear differently depending ing. on the research and how it takes form. For ex- ample, for a paper, you can include the citation In the Netherlands, there is no threshold regard- in the introductory material and again at the ing public funding for the research: any amount end. For a website, you might need to include a will qualify the article for ‘green light’ protec- ‘terms of use’ page, include the citation, and the tions. In addition, the Dutch law permits making link to the CC licence you have chosen. Alterna- the work available after only ‘a reasonable time’, tively, you could include the citation and link in which could be less than twelve months, and is the footer of each webpage. not restricted to journals with at least bi-annual publication. In general, the both the Dutch and Ultimately, you want to make it easy for users French laws apply more broadly than the Ger- to find that information and to cite your re- man law. source. Make sure you consider how to do this in your research when you’re making it available In all three jurisdictions, the author’s right to through open access. republish prevails over any assignments or restrictive clauses included in the publication contract. In other words, the law protects your right and considers these restrictions invalid. Finally, if you are in Germany, France, or the Netherlands, the following section might apply to you. Unfortunately, both those provisions limit reuse to non commercial cases, thus reuses based on these provisions, however valuable, do not I licensed my article/transferred qualify for Open Access purposes. my copyright to a publisher under German, French, or Dutch law. When might it be possible to share my work as open access? Under German, French or Dutch law, an author regains rights to his work after a ‘Fact Sheet on Creative Commons and Open Science’, Cre- certain time to use for non-commercial ative Commons UK, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.841086, CC BY purposes. 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ In some jurisdictions, the law intends to allow researchers to make their articles publicly available for non-commercial purposes after a period of time.