‘Which license should I choose?’ is one of the most frequently asked questions in our open access support inbox. In a previous blog post , we went through the fundamentals of Creative Commons licenses and provided suggestions on how to select the appropriate license for your work. In this blog post, we explain some of the undesirable consequences of applying a restrictive license to your article publication, like CC BY-Non Commercial or CC BY-Non Derivative. 

Restrictive licenses 

When selecting a license with a Non Commercial (NC) and/or Non Derivative (ND) restriction, authors often transfer the exclusive right to manage the license to their publisher. This is stated in the “License to Publish agreement”, although it is usually not clearly communicated to authors. Large commercial publishers require authors to transfer the license ownership to the publisher. See an overview of publishers’ policies on this.

When a license with an NC and/or ND restriction is used, the right to manage the license includes the right to reuse the publication either commercially or in adapted form (e.g. a translation) and grant third parties the right to do so. Since the right to manage the license has been transferred to the publisher, the publisher need not and will not consult the author(s) on these matters. Publishers can authorize commercial reuse at their sole discretion and charge third parties for permission to reuse, redistribute, adapt, and/or make the work further known. In this way, the right to commercially reuse a publication or make adaptations becomes an extra revenue stream for publishers. This is contrary to the common assumption that the authors, as copyright owners, will retain these rights. 

A possible workaround 

It is important to consider what you want to protect with a non-commercial or non-derivative license. If this is a model, an image, or data, we recommend the following steps to ensure that the right to commercially reuse the object and make derivatives remains with the author.=

STEP 1: Determine the object you want to protect.

STEP 2: Deposit the object in a trusted repository before publication and apply a CC BY-NC or CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC-ND license, depending on your needs.

STEP 3: Publish the article under a CC BY license and reference the object previously deposited in the repository in the article.

Trustworthy data repositories such as Zenodo, 4TU ResearchData, or DataVerseNL do not take over control of the license from the depositor. Authors retain the rights and permissions to reuse and redistribute their data, images, models, or other objects. Once the object is safely deposited and appropriately licensed, authors can proceed to publish the article under a CC BY license. This will enable the text of the article to be widely reused, while the object will be protected from unauthorized commercial reuse and derivatives.

If you have any questions about Creative Commons licenses, don’t hesitate to contact us at openaccess rug.nl. 

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This post is an adaptation of: 

Pascal Braak, Hans de Jonge, Giulia Trentacosti, Irene Verhagen, & Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer. (2024). Guide to Creative Commons for Scholarly Publications and Educational Resources. Zenodo. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.4090922. Licensed under a Creative Commons  Attribution 4.0 International licence.=

Openaccess.nl (2024) Impact on ownership when choosing a CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-ND Creative Commons License. Available at: https://www.openaccess.nl/en/events/impact-on-ownership-when-choosing-a-cc-by-nc-or-cc-by-nc-nd-creative-commons-license