Creative Commons licences allow you to make your work available to everyone so that they can enjoy, share, use, adapt it for their purposes or modify it in full compliance with copyright law. They fall halfway between the copyright regime, “All rights reserved”, and the public domain, “No rights reserved”, based on the principle of “Some rights reserved”.
With Creative Commons licences, in practice, the copyright holder (whether original or not) retains the moral rights to the intellectual product but transfers, in advance (i.e., before receiving a request), a series of economic rights of reuse to third parties under pre-established conditions, without having to provide express authorisation afterwards. By choosing one of the CC licences, you decide independently on
- authorship of the work;
- publication, copying and distribution of the work;
- modifications to the work;
- use of the work for economic purposes;
- use of the work for the creation of other works.
There are 7 Creative Commons licences. However, in Civil Law countries such as Italy, there are six licences ranging from the most liberal (CC BY) to the most restrictive (CC BY-NC-ND). In fact, the legal systems of these countries do not provide for the transfer of moral rights (public domain, CC0).
It refers to the conscious waiver by the author of all rights to their work, which automatically becomes public domain.
It allows copying, distribution, modification and derivative works, assuring that the author of the work is always credited.
By always citing the author and work, it allows copying, distribution, modifications and derivative copies for non-commercial purposes.
By always citing the author and work, it allows commercial and non-commercial distribution of the derivative work derived from the original, licensing the derivative work under identical terms.
It allows commercial and non-commercial redistribution of the work as long as it is transmitted in its entirety and unchanged, giving credit to the author.
It allows third parties to modify, redistribute, optimise and use a work for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the work and author and that a licence identical to that of the original work is applied to the new creations.
This is the most restrictive licence; it only allows you to download the works and share them with others as long as credit is given to the author and the work; the works cannot be modified in any way or used commercially.
The first of the ten Plan S principles, an initiative of cOAlition S (a consortium of 27 national and international research funding organisations, supported by the European Commission and Science Europe), states that: “Authors or their institutions retain copyright over their publications. All publications must be published under an open licence, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, in order to meet the requirements defined by the Berlin Declaration”.
As part of the European H2020 project (EU 8th Framework Programme for Research and Innovation from 2014 to 2020), the CC BY licence is recommended as the “best” option for publications from the point of view of applying all the principles of open science (AGA, version 5.2, 26 June 2019, p. 249).
Within the Horizon Europe framework (current EU Framework Programme for the period 2021-2027), award-winning projects must release the full text of the work under the latest version of the Creative Commons CC-BY licence -or equivalent- in order to ensure open and immediate access to the final refereed version of a scientific publication produced within the funded project. For monographs, a CC BY-NC or CC BY-ND licence may be chosen, excluding commercial uses and derivative works (AGA, version 1.2, 1 April 2024, p. 92).
All “transformative contracts” require the rights holder to choose a Creative Commons licence; the most commonly recommended licence, or in some cases, the only option possible, is CC BY.
Until now, our University has not issued any formal guidelines or other instructions to choose a CC licence. However, with a particular preference for CC BY-SA, the recommendation is to select a licence that is as closely aligned as possible with the principles of open science.
For information on the application of Creative Commons licences to research data, please refer to the relevant section displayed on this website.
For further information:
Creative Commons – Italy
Creative Commons
Creative Commons Licences Generator
Chrome extension for the Creative Commons License Generator