Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/108

 here is the Creative Commons site itself, also available under a CC Attribution license.10

The Creative Commons organisation provides seven mechanisms through which creators can allow others to use their work more permissively. The absolute, most liberal of these is the CC0 license, which ‘enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law’.11 Because it is unusual for scholars to wish to waive their right to demand attribution – and because, as I have already discussed, economies of prestige within the academy function as core drivers of academic output – I will primarily deal with the six other Creative Commons licenses that all carry an ‘attribution’ clause. That said, and as I will discuss below, academic citation norms and anti-plagiarism measures are so strong that even work under a CC0 license would probably not be subjected to misuse within the academy.

Beyond CC0, then, there are six, core, Creative Commons licenses, each with its own (at ﬁrst) perplexing acronym: CC BY, CC BY-NC, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-SA and CC BY-NC-ND. The ‘CC’ clause in each case stands for ‘Creative Commons’, clearly enough. The wording ‘BY’ in each of these phrasings is not an acronym but literally means ‘by’. Anybody using works licensed under these provisions with the ‘BY’ clause must give attribution, citing the original, and specifying by whom it was created. The modiﬁers then stand for ‘Non-Commercial’ (NC), ‘ShareAlike’ (SA) and ‘NoDerivatives’ (ND) respectively. As is clear from the above list, these modiﬁers can, in some circumstances, be compounded.

In order to explain what each of these licenses means for the licensor (the author, in this case), it is worth reproducing with minor modiﬁcations a table that can be found on page nine of the Jisc Collections guide (see Table 1).12

Note that the only two incompatible clauses are ND and SA; there is no way that a ShareAlike clause can apply if the NoDerivatives directive is also present as this would be nonsensical: there is no future derivative on which to compel sharing under the same license. Applying one of these licenses to a piece of work is as simple as writing a line of text