When publishing articles open access, authors are typically asked to choose the license under which they would like to release their publication. Creative Commons offers a range of licenses that are widely used in scholarly communications. These provide a simple and standardised way to grant permissions to share and use creative works with varying degrees of restrictiveness.

CERN's Open Access Policy requires that authors publish under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license when submitting preprints to repositories or articles to journals. This license ensures that their research can be easily accessed and freely distributed, reused, translated, adapted and built upon, even commercially, as long as proper credit is given to the original authors.

It is important to note that some restrictive CC licenses, such as CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-ND, can affect the ownership of the publication, meaning that authors transfer the exclusive rights to manage the license to their publisher. 

During the submission process, publishers offer a choice of licenses and, in some cases, more restrictive licenses are presented as the default option. In these cases, CERN authors must actively change the license to CC-BY. They are encouraged to be mindful and vigilant during the submission process to ensure that the right license is selected.

If the CC-BY option is unavailable, if you encounter any issues or have any other question, please contact: open-access-questions@cern.ch

More information: https://cern.ch/open-access