Open Licences and Open Access

Open Access refers to works where the copyright holder allows anybody to reproduce them, provided they abide by certain conditions. This is done through an open licence. The most common form of open licence is a Creative Commons licence. There are seven different Creative Commons licences, each of which has a different set of conditions associated with it. Creative Commons also provides a useful tool to help you decide which specific licence to use. Other forms of open licences you may encounter include the GNU General Public License and Open Government Licence (OGL).

Many funding bodies require that scholarly work produced thanks to their funding is published under a Creative Commons licence and the university encourages all academics, regardless of their funding, to consider making both their scholarly work and their underlying data available in open access formats. For advice on this and more information about open access, consult the Library’s Open Access Guide.