When publishing articles open access, authors are typically asked to choose the licence under which they would like to release their publication. Creative Commons offers a range of licences that are widely used in scholarly communications. These provide a simple and standardised way to grant permissions to share and use creative works with varying degrees of restrictiveness.

CERN's Open Access Policy requires that authors publish under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence when submitting preprints to repositories or articles to journals. This licence ensures that their research can be easily accessed and freely distributed, reused, translated, adapted and built upon, even commercially, as long as proper credit is given to the original authors.

It is important to note that some restrictive CC licences, such as CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-ND, can affect the ownership of the publication, meaning that authors transfer the exclusive rights to manage the licence to their publisher. 

During the submission process, publishers offer a choice of licences and, in some cases, more restrictive licences are presented as the default option. In these cases, CERN authors must actively change the licence to CC-BY. They are encouraged to be mindful and vigilant during the submission process to ensure that the right licence is selected.

If the CC-BY option is unavailable, if you encounter any issues or have any other question, please contact: open-access-questions@cern.ch

More information: https://cern.ch/open-access