A license clarifies what are the permitted uses of the work by other parties and rights of the author and user.

Within the context of Open Science, the aim of licensing is to allow broad access and reuse of research outputs. Licensing contributes to ensuring transparency and accessibility.

Each license differs in the conditions it sets on the use of the licensed work for new projects and research. These conditions can include:

  • how to correctly attribute the original authors of the work
  • if the work can be modified and re-used for a new (derived) work
  • how the derived work should be licensed, etc.

There are two main classes of licenses, each of them applicable to a specific type of work:

Open-source Licenses

Open-source licenses are commonly characterized by allowing software “to be freely used, modified, and shared”. There exist three main categories of open-source licenses:

  1. Free-for-all licenses (permissive) This type of licenses require to acknowledge the original author(s) of the licensed work in any derivative work. However, it allows derivative works to be then published under a different type of license, and/or made proprietary.

  2. Keep-open licenses This type of licenses require for the derivative work to be also released under open license. However, the derivative work (e.g. a software product) could then be included as one part of a larger proprietary work.

  3. Share-alike (copyleft) licenses This type of licenses require that, if the licensed work is included in larger work or project, the entire work should be released open-source.

A few web platforms exist that provide detailed lists of open-source licenses available and related characteristics. Also, simple online tools have been created to guide you in selecting the most appropriate open-source license based on specific needs:

  • The OpenMod Initiative Choosing a license page provides a complete overview of what should be considered when choosing an open-source license and what are the main options available
  • The Open Source Initiative also provides a comprehensive overview of open-source licenses and standards available, with a selection of the most popular ones.
  • GitHub, via Choosealicense.com provides a simple questionnaire based tool that suggests the most appropriate open-source license to be used.

Open Access Licenses

Open access licenses are targeted towards a wide variety of knowledge formats, covering data, scientific publications, websites, presentations, simple images, etc. The term ‘open access’ refers particularly to freely available literature, mainly accessible online, that allow people to:

“read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.”* (Chan et al., 2022)

The aim of the open access license is to remove all constraints over the reproduction and distribution of knowledge outputs except for the copyright, thus ensuring the authors’ right to be acknowledged and cited.

The most commonly used open access licenses are all provided by the Creative Commons organization, and vary in the degree of openness they guarantee.

Creative Commons (CC) licenses

Creative Commons (CC) licenses consist of six different licenses that define more or less permissive rules for the reproduction and distribution of the licensed output. A complete list of the CC licenses available and their related characteristics is available on the Creative Commons website

The Creative Commons License Chooser provides a simple tool to guide you in selecting the most appropriate CC license for your knowledge output, based on the most relevant feature of your choice.

Useful resources

From The Turing Way handbook to reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science. See the section on licensing for software and for data.

From the u4RIA Modelling for Policy Support forum:

This material is derived from the CCG review of good enough practices, released under a CC-BY 4.0 license.