Copyright Rules & Resources: Open Access Resources

There are several different options for Creative Commons Licenses. All of them allow a creator's work to be shared freely along certain terms, with copyright belonging to the original creator.

The different types are:

 Attribution (by): These works can be shared, read freely, and used to create new work as long as you give
attribution to the original creator.

 ShareAlike (sa): These works can be shared, read freely, and used to create new work as long as the original creator receives attribution and any new work is created under the same license.

 NonCommercial (nc): These works can be shared, read freely, and used to create new work as long as it is not for a commercial purpose and the original creator receives attribution.

NoDerivatives (nd): These works can be shared and read freely as long as the original creator receives attribution, but cannot be used to create new work.

If something is part of the public domain it does not have copyright, meaning it does not have restrictions on access or use.

This includes:

• Items with expired copyright
• Items that cannot be copyrighted (such as ideas, procedures, methods, etc.)
• Creative Commons license
• Items produced by a public entity
• Items created by the U.S. government

Gold articles are fully open access. They usually have a Creative Commons (CC) license, and can be used and shared openly. This also means the publisher's version can be deposited into institutional repositories.

Green articles can be self-archived by authors into places like institutional repositories. This is usually not the publisher's version, but a pre-print or post-print.

In order to make articles open access, institutional repositories contain different versions of articles allowed by the publisher. There are three different versions you should be aware of: pre-print, post-print, and the publisher's version.