Why Is Copyright and Licensing Important?

Copyright is a law that gives the owner of a work the right to say how other people can use it.

Copyright licenses detail the rights for publication, distribution, and use of research.

 Article to be made available under one of the Creative Commons Licenses in order to meet the terms of open access.

Creative Commons Licenses: CC BY, CC BY-NC, and CC BY-NC-ND.

The Creative Commons website explains how these licenses work.

Ÿ Copyright policies vary depending on the publisher and the journal.

 There are six main types of CC licenses – the type offered depends on the respective policy of journal or publisher.

 The most common is CC-BY – short for Creative Commons Attribution License.

This allows anyone to do what they

like with the article, e.g. build on it and do interesting things with the research, rather than having to ask.