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Publish Journal Articles Open Access: Copyright and Licensing

This guide contains information relevant to staff and students wanting to publish their journal articles Open Access.

This section contains some information on copyright and licensing issues relating to Open Access publishing.

The creative commons CC BY licence In almost all cases, the correct licence to choose is CC BY as this will conform to University and funders' Open Access policies.

For further advice and guidance contact copyright@reading.ac.uk or see the links below.

Publishing Licences - CC BY

Open access research outputs should carry a Creative Commons licence. 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 licence to a work for which you do not hold the copyright. Note that if you have assigned copyright to the publisher, you will not be able to add a licence to your work, including any earlier versions of it, unless you ask for permission from the publisher. If you retain the copyright, you can do whatever you like with your work, including adding a licence to it.

You are expected to choose the most open of the Creative Commons licences for your work. This is the CC BY 4.0 version of the licence, which enables re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. 

If youThe official CC BY button which is often used to convey the basic permissions it covers. It includes the text "CC BY" and a graphic of a person inside a circle, indicating that this licence requires attribution to be given to the creator. are funded by the UKRI or other external funders, you must choose this version of the licence or you will not be compliant with your funder's policy. For papers submitted after 1 April 2022, the UKRI will only permit the CC BY version of the licence to be used. Any exceptions will have to be applied for on a case by case basis. 

Publishing Licences - others

There may occasionally be cases in which you cannot use the CC BY licence.The official OGL button. It gives the acronym for the licence, with the G stylised to represent re-use.

  • If your work is subject to Crown Copyright, you may need to use an Open Government Licence (OGL) instead. This is compatible with the CC BY licence.
  • If you are funded by UKRI they may permit, on a case-by-case basis, the use of a more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution No-derivatives (CC BY ND). You must apply to UKRI for an exception in order to use this licence. 

3rd Party Copyright

Publishing a work under Open Access is no different from publishing under the traditional route when it comes to the requirement to obtain copyright permission to use third party content in your journal article or book. However, some types of work (such as images of fine art) carry high reproduction fees, particularly if the material is to be made freely available online.

When publishing under Open Access, you would need to negotiate for worldwide digital rights to use third party material, as it will be made available online and accessible to everyone. If you cannot get permission to reproduce material in this way, or you cannot afford the fees, you may be able to self-archive your work in CentAUR without the third party content.

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. For more information, see the Creative Commons Wiki below.