Licence Policy

Licences: our preference goes for CC BY, but authors are free to choose the licence they prefer.

Open access is, in essence, about accessing materials costlessly, but equally important, it is also about the reuse of such materials (see our Open access policy).

The BOAI (https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/) recommendations on the licensing process is to adopt the Creative Commons CC BY licence as the optimal one for the publication, distribution, use, and reuse of scholarly work. More specifically, they say:

"In developing strategy and setting priorities, we recognize that gratis access is better than priced access, libre access is better than gratis access, and libre under CC-BY or the equivalent is better than libre under more restrictive open licences".

Promoting both immediacy and permanency in open access will unlock benefits for our authors, especially with respect to visibility and citing. Also, given that it is now very frequent for founding agencies to require a CC BY licence when publishing research for which founding was received, we trust that applying a CC BY licence by default to all individual articles will be more convenient for authors.

Having said that, we believe it is fair-minded to let authors decide the level of restriction of their licence, should they wish so, or should they not feel comfortable with the idea of such a non-restrictive licence. In this regard, we suggest that authors check first with their funding agencies whether they require a specific licence, and second with the Creative Commons website to determine which licence would be the most appropriate to their needs. (https://creativecommons.org/)

About the licences: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/).

Attribution (CC BY) licence lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon authors’ work, even commercially, as long as they credit authors for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licences offered; recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon authors’ work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit authors and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND) licence allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to authors.

Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon authors’ work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge authors and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) licence lets others remix, tweak, and build upon authors’ work non-commercially, as long as they credit authors and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) licence is the most restrictive licence, only allowing others to download authors’ works and share them with others as long as they credit authors, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Once selected, Creative Commons user licences are non-revocable.

Text by Research-publishing.net (CC BY-NC-ND)