Licensing Policy

To fully realize the potential of open access to research literature, barriers to reuse need to be removed. The Creative Commons (CC) licenses have emerged as an effective legal instrument to achieve this.

  Instead of transferring rights exclusively to publishers (the approach usually followed in subscription publishing), authors grant a non-exclusive license to the publisher to distribute the work, and all users and readers are granted rights to reuse the work.

  CC-BY allows for unrestricted reuse of content, subject only to the requirement that the source work is appropriately attributed. The CC-BY license thereby requires that authors are given appropriate credit for their work, as explained in a recent post from Creative Commons (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/BIS_committee_UK_OA_Policy).