Do open licenses mean all uses of my work must be non-commercial?

This is a frequently asked question about using open licenses such as the Creative Commons licenses.

Indeed, three of the six Creative Commons licenses have a "non-commercial" clause (can you name which three?). This means if you apply these licenses to your published work, others are not allowed to use it for any commercial purpose.

However, a core value of open science is the freedom for others to share and reuse scientific outputs in any way for any purpose, including ones that make some money. This is why we have focused on the CC BY and CC BY-SA licenses. These are the two that are compatible with open science principles which you should use.

Another complication is that what counts as "commercial purpose" is not well-defined and can vary dramatically between jurisdictions. For example, if your citizen science project shares its outputs under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC), teachers from some countries won't be able to use it for teaching because that might be a "commercial" activity! The ambiguity in what "commercial" means causes a chilling effect on sharing and reuse for works licensed this way.