Creative Commons (CC) is a set of copyright licenses that unique creators of a work can use. When a work is assigned a CC license, it clarifies how others may use the work without them having to contact anyone to get permission to use it. The licenses allows to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. Each of their licenses is represented with a symbol that explains all the rights associated with the resource.
Publishers often use pre-defined CC-licenses both when you publish via the Gold route (APC) in a journal, but they also often require that you use a specfic CC-license when you deposit a manuscript in a repository. Since Green Open Access must work in harmony with the pay-to-read (subscription) the business models and subscriptions are important for the sustainability of many journals. Here the use of a non-commercial CC license is in place as an important safeguard for the publishers.
Once you have decided on a license for your work, applying it is easy. You simply add it the same way as you add other components on your article in a footer or header, like the DOI or page number.
These two parts should at least be covered:
Legal Code: The legal code is the full, legally binding text of the license. It provides the precise terms and conditions under which the work is licensed. This is the portion that lawyers and other legal professionals would refer to for detailed information.
License Title: The specific version of the Creative Commons license is usually indicated in the title, such as "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." The version number is important because it reflects the terms and conditions of the license.
You can follow this example from Elsevier:
or maybe even better this example from a Danish research journal:
Choosing a Creative Commons license depends on how you want others to use your work.
Choosing is almost down to two simple questions; You must determine if you want to allow for commercial use, and if you want to allow for adaptions (remix) of your work.
We recommend that you use the License Chooser,developed by Creative Commons, to help you choose license.
Except where otherwise noted (e.g. illustrations, videos and pictures), content on this site is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
CC-BY-NC-SA logo created by Lucas Ehlinger, https://www.flickr.com/photos/linxa/9059283431, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0