Choose the right license
Creative Commons is copyright in the age of the internet. The international non-profit organisation has developed a range of standard licenses which can be used by people who make digital contentand it gives researchers and others the possibility of totally or partly sharing their work.
With a Creative Commons license you can tailor you copyright and give an user the possibility of making use of the research without having to make an individual agreement.
By default an author does not give his or hers rights to publishers that make Open Access journals. Instead you are asked to license your article with a Creative Commons license. DTU recommends that you use the least restrictive license called CC-BY (CC Attribution 4.0) which also ensures credit by citation.
Creative Commons license
Creative Commons cover the whole area from total copyright with “all rights reserved” to public domain, a total renunciation.
Creative Commons licenses let you keep the right to your work while inviting users reuse or copy the work if following simple rules. You can e.g. choose to keep the right to get credit by citation or say that the work cannot be used commercially - depending on which license you use.
The advantage of Creative Commons is that it works across borders since all Creative Commons licenses are translated both linguistically and legal to most countries jurisdictions and are machine-readable.
As a standard, an open access journal should allow you to publish under the CC-BY license that mean "share alike with attribution". CC-BY is a license that covers exactly the needs of researchers, i.e. the result can be read and reused widely, in exchange for the author being credited for his/her work in the form of citations.
Explore the Creative Commons licenses
- the six basic licenses