Copyright and licensing affect how you can use, share, and protect research outputs — including your own. As a researcher, they matter because:
Protecting your rights – Copyright gives you control over how your work is used and shared.
Meeting funder and REF requirements – Many funders and the REF require open access with specific licensing terms.
Maximising reach – The right licence (e.g., Creative Commons) can make your work easier to share, reuse, and cite.
Avoiding legal issues – Understanding licensing helps you use others’ work appropriately and avoid infringement.
Negotiating with publishers – Knowing your rights means you can make informed choices when signing publishing agreements.
Creative Commons is a licensing scheme which allows authors to license their work so that others may re-use it without having to contact them for permission. You may not add a Creative Commons (CC) licence to a work for which you do not hold the copyright. There are several different CC licences, all of which require attribution of the author (denoted by BY in all licences' names). For further details see the Creative Commons website.
If your work contains third party copyright material, you must ensure that you have the copyright holder's permission to make their work available under a Creative Commons licence unless an exception to copyright (such as quotations for the purpose of criticism or review) applies.
Rights retention is an initiative that supports the self-archiving route to open access. It allows you to publish in a subscription journal (and hybrid journals) and also to make your manuscript available open access through self-deposit. This ensures the widest possible access to your research as well as meeting funder requirements.
Upon submission of your journal article or conference proceeding, insert a rights retention statement into the acknowledgement section of your article as well as the publisher cover letter (this is a recommended step but is not essential. Researchers can still deposit under Rights Retention if the statement is not included).
The rights retention statement should include the following wording: ‘For the purposes of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Accepted Author Manuscript version arising from this submission.’
If you include material created by someone else — text, images, charts, maps, audio, video, datasets — you are using third-party content. As the author, you are responsible for ensuring you have the right to include it. You can do this by checking the copyright status of the work you are using, requesting permission (if needed) and ensuring you give the proper attribution to anything you use.