Creative Commons licenses are commonly used in Academic Publishing. Here’s some reminders specific to academic scholarship.
Keep the following limitations of Creative Commons licenses in mind when applying a license to your own work.
Plagiarism vs. Attribution
- Citation Within Academia - CC licenses have no impact:
- With or without a CC license, your scholarly would still be protected by the anti-plagiarism values and culture of academia, requiring the following of citation standards when other academics rely on your research & ideas.
- Attribution Outside Academia:
- Outside of academia, most of copyright law and culture do not require attribution; CC licenses extend the attribution requirement to those places.
Fair Use
- With or without a CC license, others may exercise their Fair Use rights on your work.
Irrevocability
- Once your work is released with a CC license, you cannot retroactively narrow/restrict that license.
- Anyone who gained access to your work under the more open license may continue to use it within the terms of the license.
- While you cannot later restrict a license, you could later expand a license to allow for additional future uses. But that only works if you’re in control of the means of distribution and can reupload with a different CC license.
