Open Access Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is a global nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing free and open access to knowledge and creative works across the internet. Through the use of CC licenses, people can make their work freely available for legal use, sharing, repurposing, and remixing. More than 1.6 billion literary works, videos, photos, audio, open education materials, and scientific research data have been shared worldwide using the CC license.

CC licenses have many benefits, including:

• Providing users a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works
• Ensuring that works are properly attributed
• Allowing others to copy, modify, and distribute your CC licensed work

There are six CC licenses available, with the CC BY and CC BY-SA being the most common. Both allow the licensed work to be modified and used for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Both also require proper attribution. You can learn more about each of the licenses on the graphic below. 

You can learn more about all of the CC licenses by visiting https://creativecommons.org/licenses/. The Office of Scholarly Communication will be happy to meet with you to discuss how Creative Commons can be beneficial to you.