Full article: Readership Awareness Series – Paper 11: Copyright Licensing for Scientific Publications

"The availability and acceptance of open-access publications are increasing and present unique challenges regarding copyright and licensing.

Citation10 The use of any scientific work without attribution or permission is a breach of copyright laws, and the guilty can be prosecuted for Plagiarism under the law. Such laws are evolving across the world for the benefit of all stakeholders. In scientific work, much of the supplementary data and those in the tables may not be properly dedicated to the public domain due to inappropriate or inadequate data licensing. Hrynaszkiewicz and Cockerill, several years ago, proposed changes to the current copyright and licensing structure and put forth a protocol of a Creative Commons zero or CC0 to deliver such data with minimum restrictions and minimal impact on the current research flow.Citation1 The CC0 is likely to gain more attention and acceptance in the future. Under this licence, the authors waive all their rights worldwide (CC BY may be affected by international legal differences) under copyright law and all related legal rights to the extent allowed by law. Since there is no term ‘BY’ in this licence as compared to all others, attribution is not mandatory for the user. The British Library and Cologne-based libraries, for example, have released large amounts of bibliographic data under CC0 licensing.Citation1 The Creative Commons website has simplified several aspects of CC licensing, including the introduction of the ‘CC licence chooser’, which, through a series of simple questions, would help anyone decide the type of licence they would need and also view the terms of licence deeds.Citation11 The ‘Open Culture Program’ and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) ‘openly licensed preprints’ are ambitious programs of Creative Commons with a high potential for a positive impact on scientific publications...."Citation