Barriers Mean it’s not Open

Non-commercial licences in academia

Not all Creative Commons licences meet the criterion of an open licence, since re-use can be restricted in some ways. If you would like to share your work freely and encourage re-use according to the open definition, you can choose between the CC BY or CC BY-SA licences for your publications. When sharing other material such as research data you could consider the CC0 as long as you do not infringe the rights of third parties (Forschungsdaten.info. 2022 Publishing Data). Metadata information should be made available via CC0 for large-scale re-use and to ensure that the work is easy to find.

To avoid a barrier, you should not choose a licence with a non-commercial element for scholarly content, since it can greatly hinder re-using your work in academic contexts. This is further explained in the short clip “The non-commercial license in academia”.

TASK

You had an interesting breakthrough in your field and wrote a paper about it. You want your work to be as visible as possible, but you want to prevent commercial players from making money off your idea. Which licence should you choose and why? Please write your answer in the comments.