Research takes many different shapes and sizes depending on the academic discipline you are in. We won’t be diving into the details of open access publishing here, but instead focus on the principles of openly licensing your research or using someone else’s open content.
The distinction between sharing your creative work and using someone else’s is important to make because the former is about the rights you give other people, and the latter is for how other creators have given permissions to the general public to use their content in specific ways.
You make a decision to retain your copyright and allow your creative works to have a specific open license in perpetuity. You also have the option to share your work in the public domain, which means you give up your copyrights and allow anyone in the world to use your work in any way forever.
You are required to give original creators attribution when using their works. You are also required follow the permissions associated with the open license.
Open sharing is when creators make a choice to have their creative works copyright free or stay in copyright but license content with specific terms of use.
These are 5 permissions foundational to open licenses. These are the rights typically associated with using content for research, education, personal, and commercial use.
Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
Open Licenses are a set of conditions applied to an original work that grant permission for anyone to make use of that work as long as they follow the conditions of the license.
Creative Commons is a global non-profit whose missing is to enable the sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge. They have worked for decades to create and standardize licenses that facilitate these goals.
Creative Commons Licenses, also known as CC Licenses, are available for anyone in the world to use. There are also different types of use depending on the conditions a creator wants to set for sharing and use.
A typical misconception about CC Licenses is that creators lose their copyright. This is false. The goal is CC Licenses is for creators to keep their copyright, but license their works to be shared and used in specific ways. However, it is important to note that once a creator applies a CC license when it can never been changed. The license is in perpetuity.
The infographic made available through this resource represented how open or closed a CC License is. There are 7 CC licenses in total.
Search these online databases to find CC licensed content for you to reuse in your research.