Use open licenses to make sharing and reuse easier

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Copyright restrictions often create friction in the flow of knowledge, especially for open science processes. To prevent problems such as those in the example we discussed, legal experts, open science advocates, and those wishing for easier sharing of culture collaborated to write a set of standardised licenses that anyone can use.

GIF animation of Creative Commons logo.

Animated Creative Commons logo by Abbey Elder from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

This effort was organised by a non-profit organisation called Creative Commons. Starting in 2002, a series of six Creative Commons licenses were created. Each one allows the licensed work to be copied and shared, but with varying sets of conditions, some more restrictive than others. Creative Commons has a step-by-step tool to help you choose and apply a license. They even have a search engine for finding material that uses Creative Commons licenses.

In the spirit of open science as described in the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, two of the six Creative Commons licenses are generally used.

CC BY license logo CC BY-SA logo
Creative Commons license buttons by Creative Commons from here, CC BY 4.0

The Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) is the simplest to understand and use. Any work shared under CC BY can be copied and used by anyone for any purpose. The only condition is that proper attribution is provided to the original creator (hence the use of the word “Attribution” in the name of the license).
The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA) is almost identical to CC BY but it comes with one extra condition: Derivative works must be shared under the same license.

The conditions of these two Creative Commons licenses may seem abstract, so let’s apply it to the previous example.