The Creative Commons organisation was founded in 2001 to manage these legal tools and help power the open movement in partnership with members of the Creative Commons Global Network.

They also provide useful online resources such as OpenVerse, a search engine for openly-licensed images and audio, and the Licence Chooser tool.

Marking your work

It's good practice for a creator to mark their work with their chosen licence, and you can generate a suitable line of text or code for this purpose using the Creative Commons Licence Chooser. The Creative Commons wiki offers some best practice guidance for marking your work, including considerations for different formats and marking third party content (material created by others).

For scholarly articles authored by York staff, the University Research Publications & Open Access Policy recommends that submitted articles should include the following text in the funding acknowledgement section of your manuscript and in any cover letter/note accompanying the submission:

For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

For some research funders, such as UKRI, Wellcome and NIHR, including this or a similar statement is a formal obligation, and is sometimes referred to as a 'rights retention statement' (see our Open Access Publishing Practical Guide for specific information on funder policies).

Creative Commons licensing options are supported by a wide range of research-hosting platforms. This includes publisher sites, platforms such as GitHub and OSF, and institutional repositories such as Pure and White Rose Research Online, which allow authors to select a licence at the point of deposit. Our research theses repository White Rose eTheses Online also provides licensing options for postgraduate researchers. 

Crediting other people's work 

In their recommended practices for attribution, Creative Commons advise that you include the Title, Author, Source, and Licence (TASL) as basic components when crediting other people's work. Your attribution should be reasonable and suited to the context in which you are reusing the work. They provide the following as an example of great attribution:

Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by Timothy Vollmer is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Creative Commons and copyright

Creative Commons legal tools work within the framework of copyright law and depend on the existence of copyright in order to work (see Creative Commons FAQs: is Creative Commons against copyright?). They enable the public to use copyright-protected works in certain ways without having to ask permission (they do not affect the ways in which copyright owners can use their work for themselves). They do not affect legal rights already granted to users of copyrighted works, such as the various exceptions governed by the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act.

If a work is co-created, for example a publication co-authored with members of a research group, then copyright will be shared between its creators who should discuss and agree which licence would be most appropriate for the work. 

Validity and durability

The current set of licences (version 4.0) are internationally valid and can be applied to a wide range of works including text, databases, images and basically any other formats except for software (see right). Older versions of the licences could be localised (ported) to different jurisdictions, but Creative Commons now advise against using these versions as they are not kept up to date and may not be internationally valid (see Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions: Should I choose an international license or a ported license?). 

Creative Commons licences are technically irrevocable. If a creator has control over the distribution of a licensed work then they can cease sharing it under a particular licence (or make the work available under different terms, as Creative Commons licences are non-exclusive), but anyone who still has access to a copy of the work is entitled to continue using it under the original licence that was applied.

Creative Commons Licences remain valid for as long as the underlying copyright lasts. Generally speaking this will be until 70 years after the death of the author - once copyright has expired, the work will enter the public domain and is free from any usage restrictions. 

Licence design

The licences are basic but innovative in design, comprising three layers: the legal code, the 'human-readable' Commons Deed and the machine readable code that can be embedded in a variety of file types (see About the Licences on the Creative Commons site for further information).

The licences do not automatically detect misuse of a work, but they put the creator in a strong (and legally enforceable) position to approach anyone they discover misusing the work, and ask them to stop. Creative Commons provide further advice on misuse; steps that creators can take if they believe a user has violated licence terms in their treatment of the work.

Image credit: 'Three 'Layers' of Licenses' by Creative Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0)

If your research is directly funded by the UK Government or comprises of public sector information subject to Crown Copyright then you may be required to apply an Open Government Licence (OGL 3.0) to any outputs arising from your work. The terms of this licence are similar to the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY), and research outputs can be OGL-licensed in accordance with both the UKRI and NIHR open access publishing policies.