For questions, please contact Claus Rosenkrantz Hansen and Lene Janussen Gry at oa@cbs.dk
If you are in doubt about which Creative Commons licence to choose, then the Creative Commons Licence Chooser might be able to help you.
Please note that once you have assigned a Creative Commons licence to your research publication, there is no way back. A Creative Commons licence cannot be revoked.
When you make your research publications Open Access, you may want to make it clear to others exactly how they may share and use your work in certain ways, without them having to ask permission to do so.
Assigning a Creative Commons license to your research publications is a standardized way of doing this. One can say that with Creative Commons licenses, you go from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved”, allowing others to do certain things with a work.
Note that you will not lose the copyright to your research publications if you assign them a Creative Commons license!
Your choice of Creative Commons license will depend on which rights you as the author wish to reserve for yourself. You can choose between six different Creative Commons licenses.
Attribution license or CC BY: This license is the Creative Commons license that gives others the most freedom in terms of what they can do with your research publication. With this license, you allow others use it in any way, even commercially, under the condition that as you as the author are acknowledged.
Attribution-ShareAlike license or CC BY-SA: With this license, you allow others to use your research publication in any way, including commercially, as long as you are acknowledged as the author, and they assign whatever they create with it the same license.
Attribution-NonCommercial license or CC BY-NC: With this license, others may use your research publication, but only for non-commercial purposes, and you must be acknowledged as the author. Please note that any derivative works do not need to be assigned the same license as you have assigned to your research publication.
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license or CC BY-NC-SA: This license allows others to use your research publication for exclusively non-commercial purposes. In doing so, they must assign any derivative works the same licence as you have assigned to your work.
Attribution-NoDerivatives licence or CC BY-ND: This license allows others to share your research publication (copy and redistribute it), even for commercial purposes, but they must credit you. However, they are not allowed to make any changes to it and share these derivative works with others.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence or CC BY-NC-ND: This license is the most restrictive of the six Creative Commons licenses. With this license, others are allowed to share your research publication (copy or redistribute it) for non-commercial purposes if they credit you. They are not allowed to adapt (remix, transform or build upon) it in any way.