Licensing Policy

To fully realize the potentialof open access to research literature, barriers to reuse need to be removed.The Creative Commons (CC) licenses have emerged as an effective legal instrumentto achieve this.

Instead of transferringrights exclusivelyto publishers(the approach usually followed in subscriptionpublishing),authors grant a non-exclusivelicense to the publisherto distribute the work, and all users and readers are granted rights to reuse the work.

CC-BYallows for unrestrictedreuse of content,subjectonly to the requirementthat the source work is appropriatelyattributed.The CC-BY license therebyrequiresthat authors are given appropriatecredit for their work, as explained in a recentpost from Creative Commons (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/BIS_committee_UK_OA_Policy).