Understanding how to manage copyright ownership for your publications is important to ensure your papers can be openly licenced on CRO. Having openly licenced outputs may increase the visibility of your research.

Fundamental to open access publishing is the consent of the copyright holder to share their work. Importantly, making outputs open access does not deprive copyright holders of any rights.

Copyright holders normally consent to the unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking, and crawling of the full text of the work. Authors can attach licences to their work to protect their rights, i.e., block the distribution of misattributed copies or commercial re-use, for example, while still permitting legitimate scholarship.

Creative Commons have developed a series of licences that cater for different access and re-use requirements. Publishing under a Creative Commons licence permits users to make use of your work in various ways, but only under certain conditions. The copyright owner can select the type of licence that best suits their needs.

Benefits

The limited copying and dissemination rights in the Copyright Act make most sense where a copyright owner wants to retain maximum control over, for example, a commercially produced copyright work. Whereas a CC licence can be used to enable dissemination and increase the visibility of your work. 

What content is covered?

A CC licence covers any content that you are the copyright owner of including original written, photographic and artistic content that you have created and which you control the rights to. If you have previously published the content elsewhere, or entered into any type of assignment or licensing agreement, it is likely you do not control the relevant rights.

How do I assign a Creative Commons licence?

• Use the CC tools provided by CreativeCommons.org to decide which licence you want to use
• Use the CC tools to create the icon, an acknowledgement and short licence description suitable for your chosen licence
• Insert the CC details into your work: Paste the icon and other automatically generated details into your work.