Introduction
Open Access (OA) licensing is central to open scholarship, supporting everything from research publishing to free education resources. Copyright is the legal right to control the use, publication and distribution of creative and intellectual works. OA licences provide a way for copyright holders to give permission in advance for their works to be freely used, shared, and adapted by others.
Understanding how copyright applies and how open licences modify those rights is essential for anyone engaging in open research, teaching, or resource creation. It is also key to meeting the F.A.I.R and C.A.R.E. principles of research data management, which emphasise making data ‘as open as possible, and as closed as necessary.’
This Open Education Resource (OER) is a practical guide to OA licencing for Charles Sturt University staff, researchers and students. It explains:
- the basics of copyright and how open access licencing relates to copyright legislation
- how to reuse openly licensed works in study, teaching and research
- what Creative Commons licences are, what they mean and how to apply them
- how to publish theses, OER, research, and data with open licences.
What you’ll learn.
Part I introduces copyright and explains the concepts of ‘all rights reserved’, public domain, free to read and open access.
Part II is about Creative Commons (CC) licences, explaining their legal structure, how to attribute creators, how to choose and apply a CC licence and how works licensed under CC can be reused, remixed or adapted.
Part III will cover other open licences used for software and data (pending).
