DSRH

Making publications/research data available as Open Access does not mean you, as the creator, are giving it away. When you create a work, you have rights of ownership and other people need your permission in order to use that work.  Licences are a means of giving someone else permission to use your work in a certain way. You can also waive your rights and place the work in the public domain and that means anybody can use the work in whatever way they choose.

Open Licences

These place very few restrictions on what people can do with the content or data that is being licensed.

An open license will allow others to do things like

• Republish the content/data on their own website
• Derive new content or data from yours
• Make money by selling products that use your content/data
• Republish the content or data while charging a fee for access.

The most common restrictions imposed in an Open Licence are:

• Reusers must give attribution to the source of the content or data (in other words state you are the author)
• That users must publish any derived content/data under the same license (this is called share alike)

The most commonly used licences in this area are the CREATIVE COMMONS licenses. On the Creative Commons web page under the Share Your Work tab a “chooser” assists you to select the most appropriate licence.  

Arrow@dit (the institutional repository) uses the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, which allows others to reuse your work as long as they attribute you as the creator and for non-commercial use only.