Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons Licenses enable authors and creators of published works a new legal framework within which they can maintain copyright and ownership of what they have created and decide what permissions/rights they wish to give (or attribute) to users of their works.

Creative Commons Licenses are used widely within Open Access publishing and to some extent, their use has also been incorporated as an option by many commercial academic publishers.

For organisations such as Tusla: Child and Family Agency, the existence and use of Creative Commons Licenses is extremely important. Plan S states that

“With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access journals, on Open Access platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo”.

Moreover, the first principle of Plan S states that,

“Authors or their institutions retain copyright to their publications. All publications must be published under an open license, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY)”

There are five Creative Commons Licenses. They can be viewed together with more information about each at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/. The descriptions below have been taken from the Creative Commons website.

While every attempt has been made to keep language as accessible as possible, it is important to remember that these are legal definitions and as a result there has been a need to use precise language in their description.

Attribution
CC BY

This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Attribution-ShareAlike
CC BY-SA

This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

Attribution-NoDerivs
CC BY-ND

This license lets others reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to you.

Attribution-NonCommercial
CC BY-NC

This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC BY-NC-SA

This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

There is also a tool available at https://creativecommons.org/choose/ which will help you choose the license most suitable for your purposes and intentions.