Moving Forward: BioMed Central’s open access license is being updated to CC-BY 4.0 - BioMed Central blog

"Back in August we announced that all data published in BioMed Central articles would be published under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain waiver for data. At that time, we also announced our intention to upgrade the attribution component of BioMed Central’s license agreement from CC-BY 2.0, which we introduced as our standard license in 2004, to the latest  license version, CC-BY 4.0. This improved and updated version of the CC-BY license was released on 25 November 2013. We are now able to confirm that all BioMed Central, Chemistry Central, and SpringerOpen articles submitted on or after 3 February 2014 will be published, if and when editorially accepted, under the updated CC-BY 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution license. This also applies to open access articles published in the majority of Springer’s subscription-based journals using the Open Choice option. For BioMed Central and Chemistry Central, this will mean works will be published under a combined Creative Commons Attribution license for published articles (papers) and Creative Commons CC0 waiver for published data (such as tables and data in bibliographies or supplementary material). What does this licensing change mean? The CC-BY license is a license designed  to allow the benefits of open access to be fully realized in a digital world. With version 4.0, we now have the most up-to-date version of that license, so the work we publish can benefit from more than a decade of community input and improvement that has gone into the CC-BY license ..."