“As open as possible” – CC licences facilitate the reuse of research outputs

Open licences in publications 

The CC licences are based on four core conditions: Attribution (BY), NonCommercial (NC), NoDerivatives (ND), and ShareAlike (SA). In 2019, Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 was selected as the standard licence for European Commission materials. In addition to ease of use, CC licences are standardised, relatively straightforward in terms of usage conditions, widely used internationally, and many research funders require their use in publications resulting from funded projects. 

Research funders aim to promote both the dissemination and reuse of research outputs and the rights of researchers to their work and findings. Therefore, the chosen Creative Commons licence must guarantee the ability to redistribute and modify the content. The international group of research funders known as cOAlition S and their strategy Plan S, which aims to promote immediate open publication of research results, also emphasises reuse through open CC licences. Organisations committed to Plan S include Horizon Europe and the Research Council of Finland. These organisations require that peer-reviewed articles from funded projects are published primarily under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 licence, which allows redistribution and modification of the article as long as the author is credited. Horizon Europe allows the use of CC BY-NC or CC BY-ND licences, which restrict commercial use and modification, for monographs. 

Open Licences in Research Data 

A survey conducted by the Center for Cultural Policy Research Cupore revealed that researchers are sometimes uncertain about the legality of using research data. Usage can be complicated by factors such as fees and the need to contact rights holders, which may slow down the research process and lead to some datasets being excluded entirely. 

Research data may contain elements protected by copyright. Typically, copyright must be considered when using data not produced by the researcher themselves, such as images, texts, videos, audio recordings, games, etc., created by research subjects. Using such data in the desired way usually requires permission from the copyright holder or the owner of the work. 

The ability to reuse data that a researcher has previously collected or obtained from earlier projects or data archives accelerates and enhances research work. It can even enable the formation of new types of comparative frameworks. Reusing data also saves time for research participants, as individuals from a specific target group do not need to answer the same questions again. Reuse of data is also encouraged by research funders. 

The best way to promote open access to both data collected during research and other data used in research is through Creative Commons licences. The most suitable licence for research data is CC BY 4.0, but the CC0 waiver can also be used for licensing data and is a powerful tool for promoting openness. It allows data to be used freely for any imaginable purpose, without even needing to credit the author. A typical application for the CC0 licence is metadata of research datasets, where free transferability between databases and systems makes CC0 practically essential. 

Using the CC BY 4.0 licence, the CC0 waiver, or similar licences is a requirement for projects funded through the Horizon Europe framework program. From the perspective of open science, using licences is essential, because without defined terms of use or agreements, the data cannot be used in research. 

Licensing Open Educational Resources and Artificial Intelligence 

Open educational resources (OER) refer to digital teaching, learning, and research materials designed for educational purposes. OERs differ from traditional educational materials in terms of licensing and usage rights. Their openness is defined using David Wiley’s 5R framework.

In Wiley’s 5R model, open content is licensed in a way that allows users to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute educational materials. The recommended licence for OERs is CC BY-SA. Materials under this licence can be freely copied, shared, and modified — even for commercial purposes — but all modified versions must be licensed under the same CC BY-SA licence. The author must always be properly credited when the material is used. 

As generative AI becomes more common, educators have identified new areas for development in teaching, such as openly sharing prompts. Open licences could be used to facilitate this sharing. It would be useful to develop a common repository or data bank where teachers, researchers, and students could find and reuse prompts (see Tlili et al., 2024). 

In 2024, UNESCO published a new recommendation, the Dubai Declaration on Open Educational Resources, which explores the impact of new AI technologies on the creation, publication, and use of OERs. As AI software becomes more widespread, the terms of use for OERs raise various questions. 

One major issue is authorship and the training data used by AI software. If a teacher creates course materials with the help of AI, how should authorship be defined? It’s also unclear what materials can be input into AI systems. In principle, the copyright holder has the right to decide how their works are used. Additionally, training AI with CC-licensed content becomes problematic because the CC BY 4.0 licence, which allows the broadest reuse, requires that the author be credited. 

For this reason, Creative Commons is developing a tool called preference signals, which would allow authors to specify more precisely how their content may be used in AI training.