What is a licence?
Different licence schemes and how they apply to research
There are many ways to licence or provide permission for your research outputs. This will depend on several factors, including the type of output produced, and who owns the copyright to it.
Open licences
You can choose from a number of open licencing schemes available. The type of licence you choose depends on the type of content being published, and what range and level of permissions you desire.
Publisher licences
Publishers can issue licences over the content for which they have assumed copyright; these may provide permissions to read, download, use, re-post, remix, and perform other actions on the content, for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Publisher licences tend to be more restrictive than open licencing standards, allowing only the minimum access and use rights.
Below are some examples of open licence schemes:
Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY)
This license lets anyone copy, share, adapt, remix, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most open and permissive copyright license offered by Creative Commons. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials. This license is mandated by most research funders.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)
This license lets others remix, tweak, 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.
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND)
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC)
This license lets others remix, tweak, 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.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND)
This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.
The Open Government Licence is a UK-based public sector information licence scheme, developed and held by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO) and used for the release and sharing of public sector information held under Crown Copyright, or by UK Government departments.
Datasets, such as health and other survey data are released under the OGL through the data.gov.uk portal.
GNU is a copyleft software licencing system supported and sponsored by the Free Software Foundation; the GNU licence is designed for the release and use of software and other content.
GNU GPL provides standardised permissions for the use and modification (or restrictions thereof) of software and is widely used.
ODC is a set of legal tools from the Open Knowledge Foundation, specifically designed to support the sharing, use, remixing and repurposing of research data
There are three types of licence:
- Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) — “Public Domain for data/databases”
- Attribution License (ODC-By) — “Attribution for data/databases”
- Open Database License (ODC-ODbL) — “Attribution Share-Alike for data/databases”
More details can be found on the Open Data Commons website.