Effective Research Publishing Handbook

'Open licence' means a licence that permits anyone to freely access, use, modify, and share the licensed material for any purpose. This may include licences conformant with the Open Definition that are commonly used for scholarly works and datasets, such as the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY); Open Government Licence (OGL) for public sector information; and Open Source licences typically used for software source code, such as the Apache License 2.0 or the GNU General Public License (GPL). 

Creative Commons, has a number of model licences which authors can apply ‘as given’ or adapted to their requirements.  The licences contain these elements:

• Attribution (BY) - You must credit the licensor of the work.                 
• Non Commercial (NC) - You can only use the work for non-commercial purpose.                 
• No Derivatives (ND) - You may not create adaptations of the work.                 
• Share alike (SA) - You may create adaptations of the work, but these must be under the same licence as this work.   
• Free of all copyright restrictions (CC0) - This is the most liberal licence and means no copyright is reserved.

These licences are commonly found on Open Access research outputs, and can help you share your work while protecting its integrity. The licenses have a layer of Legal Code, a 'human readable' Commons Deed and a 'machine readable' element for software to understand.