Copyright and Creative Commons Licensing

Open Science is the practice of science in such a way that others can collaborate and contribute, where research data, lab notes and other research processes are freely available, under terms that enable reuse, redistribution and reproduction of the research and its underlying data and methods.

 - FOSTER Open Science Definition

Open Science is connected to the dissemination of that research to other scientists, and the public. Much of scientific research is funded by the public, thus there has been an increasing attention to ensuring that there is broad public access to the outputs (articles and data) of publicly funded science. 

This means that articles developed as a result of public funding must be shared under a liberal open license (such as CC BY) so that everyone else is granted permission to read and re-use that publicly funded research. 

PLOS

• PLOS (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit scientific and medical publishing venture that provides scientists and physicians with high-quality, high-profile journals in which to publish their most important work.

BioMed Central

• BioMed Central is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model, and was acquired by Springer Verlag in 2008. All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. 

Hindawi

• Hindawi Publishing Corporation is a commercial publisher of peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines. In 2007 Hindawi entered into a publishing partnership with SAGE Publications in order to jointly develop a collection of open access journals, which are hosted on the SAGE-Hindawi platform.

Nature Publishing Group

• In December 2007, NPG introduced the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike Unported licence for those articles in Nature journals that are publishing the primary sequence of an organism’s genome for the first time. All articles in NPG’s open-access journals Molecular Systems Biology, Clinical and Translational Gastroenterology, and Cell Death and Disease are published under either a Creative Commons attribution-non commercial-share alike unported licence or a non commercial-no derivativess licence. Articles published at Nature Communications under the open access option are published under the same Creative Commons licences as detailed for Molecular Systems Biology.

Personal Genome Project

• The Personal Genome Project hopes to make personal genome sequencing more affordable, accessible, and useful for humankind. Volunteers make their full sequence genomes, information about their health, and a line of stem cells derived from their bodies available for all research and commercial purposes. CC0 is used to free the data and health information, and our Materials Transfer Agreements keep the lines of stem cells in the commons.

Open data is data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike.

- Open Data Handbook

The sharing of open data can be incredibly beneficial to society: facilitating enhanced scientific collaboration and reproducibility, increasing government and corporate transparency, and speeding the discovery and understanding of solutions to planetary and societal needs.

Many organizations, institutions, and governments are using Creative Commons licenses to share data. The CC0 Public Domain Dedication can be particularly important to maximize the re-use of data and databases, since it otherwise may be unclear whether highly factual data and databases are restricted by copyright or other rights. CC0 is intended to cover all copyright and database rights, so that however data and databases are restricted (under copyright or otherwise), those rights are all surrendered.

Open data policies are being adopted to ensure access to data—either as a raw material, or alongside other types of scholarly outputs. And data-specific repositories allow users to upload and share under CC licenses.

"Open Science" by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Open Data" by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0