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Scholarly Publishing and Open Access: Creative Commons

Guide for student and faculty authors to understand scholarly publishing, open access, and retaining copyright. Several content boxes in this guide were used with permission from Boston College.

Creative Commons

This non-profit organization has provided an easy way for you to share your creative work. Without relinquishing any of your copyrights,  use a Creative Commons license to allow others to reproduce your copyrighted work and stipulate conditions that must be met. For example, you may require attribution and no commercial use. These and other conditions have been pre-bundled in various combinations; you pick one of these license bundles from the Creative Commons menu. A plug-in is available for Microsoft Office that simplifies this task.

Creative Culture

Growth in CC-BY License Use

A total of 252,418 articles were published with the CC-BY license during the period shown above. OASPA blog.

CC Licenses