Open your work with a Creative Commons Licence
This #OAWeek we are introducing five tips on how to make your research open and find open research. Yesterday we looked at ORCiD; today’s tip is Open your work with a Creative Commons licence.
Open Access is the free, online availability of research outputs with reuse rights. This is where Creative Commons (CC) licences come in. An open licence is the difference between research outputs being available for free on the internet and being free to reuse. A CC licence shows how a work can be reused, how it can be distributed, adapted, remixed, built upon, or commercialised.
If you are publishing your research in an Open Access journal, you will retain the rights to reuse your own work. If you are handing over your copyright to the publisher of a subscription journal however, consider first publishing your images, figures, tables, or other supplementary material with a CC licence. This will allow you to reuse these research outputs in other publications, without the need to seek permission from the publisher. Researchers Sara Hanzi and Hans Straka have written about how they went about publishing their images of tadpoles and froglets with a CC licence on figshare.
Remember, open access accelerates the pace of discovery by exposing research findings to a wider audience. By harnessing the power of networks to share research findings with practitioners who can apply the new knowledge, open access also accelerates the translation of research into benefits for the public.
You can read more about Open access and CC licences on the Creative Commons Australia website here: https://creativecommons.org.au/open-access/.
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