Creative Commons Licenses
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s pressing challenges.
Authors give away the copyright rights to their work to the publisher when the article is published in the traditional publication process.
However, when authors publish their work via the Open Access process, they retain the copyright of that work. It is important that authors assign a Creative Commons license to determine how their work may be used and shared.
Attribution means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only if they give you credit.
Noncommercial means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work - and derivative works based upon it - but for noncommercial purposes only.
No Derivative Works means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.
Share Alike means:
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.
To Learn more about Creative Commons Licences, please visit their website https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Use this universal tool if you are a holder of copyright or database rights, and you wish to waive all your interests that may exist in your work worldwide. Because copyright laws differ around the world, you may use this tool even though you may not have copyright in your jurisdiction, but want to be sure to eliminate any copyrights you may have in other jurisdictions.
CC BY-SA: This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms.
CC BY-SA includes the following elements:
BY – Credit must be given to the creator
SA – Adaptations must be shared under the same terms
CC BY-NC: This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.
It includes the following elements:
BY – Credit must be given to the creator
NC – Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted
CC BY-NC-SA: This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms.
CC BY-NC-SA includes the following elements:
BY – Credit must be given to the creator
NC – Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted
SA – Adaptations must be shared under the same terms
CC BY-ND: This license allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use.
CC BY-ND includes the following elements:
BY – Credit must be given to the creator
ND – No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted
CC BY-NC-ND: This license allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.
CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements:
BY – Credit must be given to the creator
NC – Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted
ND – No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted
The six licenses and the public domain dedication tool give creators a range of options. The best way to decide which is appropriate for you is to think about why you want to share your work, and how you hope others will use that work.
For help, try the Creative Commons License Chooser.
Before you apply a CC license or CC0 to your work, there are some important things to consider:
The licenses and CC0 cannot be revoked. This means once you apply a CC license to your material, anyone who receives it may rely on that license for as long as the material is protected by copyright, even if you later stop distributing it.
You must own or control copyright in the work. Only the copyright holder or someone with express permission from the copyright holder can apply a CC license or CC0 to a copyrighted work. If you created a work in the scope of your job, you may not be the holder of the copyright.
CC-licensing your work is simple. All you have to do is choose the CC license that suits your needs and then communicate this choice in a way that will be clear to people who come across your work. As part of this communication, you should include a link to the license you’ve chosen.
This can be as simple as a bit of text stating and linking to the license in a copyright notice, like this:
© 2019. This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.
…or as complex as embedding the license information on your website using the HTML code associated with the particular license. Use the Creative Commons License Chooser to get the relevant HTML code.
The Creative Commons South Africa Chapter was founded on 3 October 2019
The Open Educational Resources Movement and Creative Commons Open Licenses
Paul West (South Africa Chapter: Lead). 4 September 2020
Frontiers is a gold open access publisher. At the point of publication, all articles from our portfolio of journals are immediately and permanently accessible online free of charge. Frontiers articles are published under the CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and the source are credited.
