This post was written by Melody Herr, Head of the Office of Scholarly Communications, for Open Access Week 2017.
Commons. The word brings to mind sheep grazing on the hillsides surrounding a medieval village, yet it is also quite fitting for digital pasturelands. Here, citizens of the World Wide Web share an infinite variety of resources for enlightenment and entertainment. From the early days, visionaries such as the founders of Project Gutenberg sowed the digital commons with materials from the public domain. In the analog world, public domain materials were already free from the restrictions of copyright; but once digitized and transplanted to the Web, they became accessible
to more users and adaptable for more uses.
This week, we celebrate the Open Access Movement, a response to the concern that publishers, music companies, and other corporations dealing in intellectual property raise fences around essential resources that would benefit the whole community. By placing research, scholarship, and creative work in the global digital commons, the Movement’s supporters aim to make these resources more available. But sharing is one thing and surrendering all rights is quite another. Individuals who find conventional copyright provisions too restrictive may nonetheless hesitate to place their work in the public domain, where anyone can exploit it for any purpose.
A Creative Commons (CC) license provides a third option, a middle ground between the domain of copyright and the public domain. It allows you, the creator (author, artist, composer, cartoonist, videographer, chef, etc., etc.), to choose which rights to retain and to specify exactly how others may use your work. Here, a quick overview of US Copyright Law may be helpful.
Unless you created the work for your employer, you own the copyright and legal protections apply as soon as your work is “fixed in any tangible medium of expression” (§ 102 (a)). There is no need to register copyright in order to enjoy the protections offered by copyright law. That is, the moment you turn your idea into something concrete, you own the rights pertaining to it.
Copyright bundles together several rights (§ 106):
– Reproduction – the right to make multiple copies of the work
– Adaptation/Modification –the right to create new derivative products based upon the work, e.g., translations, film adaptations, remixes
– Distribution – the right to sell, rent, loan, or give away copies of the work
– Public Performance – the right to perform the work in public, whether live, broadcast, or recorded
– Public Display – the right to display or exhibit the work
When you sign a publishing contract (or a comparable agreement, depending on the nature of the work in question), you transfer some or all of these rights to the other party. And if you grant exclusive rights, no one else – not even you – may legally copy, adapt, distribute, perform, or display the work. For this reason, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), a leader of the Open Access Movement, designed the Author Addendum for journal publishing agreements which asserts that the author retains the right to reproduce, distribute, and create derivatives of his article for non-commercial purposes. The SPARC addendum also enables the author to offer his work to the world for non-commercial purposes under an open license, such as Creative Commons.
A CC license does not replace or conflict with copyright, provided that you hold all the rights which you wish to share. If you have already transferred exclusive rights to a publisher, you cannot grant them to others. An open license is nonexclusive, meaning that at any time, anyone, anywhere may take advantage of it, no matter who else is using it simultaneously.
The license-builder on the Creative Commons website offers four conditions which you may choose to apply: attribution, derivative/no derivatives, commercial/noncommercial, share alike. These conditions specify what others may or may not do with your work. If a use is not specifically prohibited, it is allowed. If it is not specifically mandated, it is not required. Each condition is represented by a symbol and a pair of letters.
This is the Creative Commons symbol:
This symbol automatically appears on every license, indicating that one does not need to obtain permission from the creator to use the work, as long as the use meets the specified conditions.
The first condition is attribution, represented by this symbol
and the letters BY. When you select this condition, everyone who uses your work must give you credit. For example, if you are sharing a photograph, a user must include a credit line naming you as the photographer. This is the least restrictive of the license options. Next, you can choose whether or not to allow others to make derivatives, that is, to adapt or modify your work. If you specify no derivatives, represented by this symbol
and the letters ND, others may copy, distribute, perform, or display your work as long as they make no changes to the original. For example, if you are sharing a poem, others may recite your poem at a local pub but they may not set it to music and sing it.
You may choose to prohibit commercial uses of your work. If you are sharing a musical composition, for example, others may perform it in nonprofit venues or use it for other noncommercial purposes, but they may not turn it into an advertising jingle. The license symbol for noncommercial uses is easily identifiable:
and the two-letter equivalent is NC.
Finally, you may encourage others to contribute to the digital commons by mandating that all derivatives, adaptations, and modifications must be made available with a CC license identical to the one under which you are offering this work. The Share Alike symbol calls to mind the recycling symbol:
and employs the letters SA.
The most restrictive combination of these conditions allows others to copy and share your work as long as they give you credit but prohibits them from changing your work in any way or using it commercially. The license looks like this
CC BY-NC-ND
If you’re looking for open scholarly research or trying to decide which conditions are most appropriate for your own publication, head to the Directory of Open Access Journals and look at the licenses used by journals in your field. If you’re searching for open resources – or wondering how to add your own work to the digital commons – check out the Creative Commons directory and the list of websites in the library research guide.
Go ahead, plant some flowers in the Web community park.
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