CC licences help Australian academics and researchers who want to share their research with a wider audience and encourage others to build on it. Licensed materials can include journal articles, books, book chapters, conference papers, data sets, software, educational materials and creative works. A number of Australian research funders and Australian universities have introduced policies mandating Open Access to publicly funded research outputs. CC licenses are a common choice for meeting these requirements.
Potential benefits for Australian researchers using CC licences include:
- Increased awareness of your research: CC licences are widely recognised and respected, and CC-licensed material is discoverable by search engines and other online platforms. Because there is a machine-readable layer to CC-licences, your research is more likely to be found and shared when it is licensed under CC. Research suggests that CC-licensed research articles are downloaded more often than non-Open Access papers and CC-licensed books receive more citations, downloads and usage than non-Open Access books.
- Reaching wider audiences: CC allows you to share your research with anyone in the world, regardless of their location or financial resources. This can help academics and artists to build a global audience and connect with other researchers all over the world.
- Stimulating new research and innovation: CC licenses can help to stimulate further research and innovation by making it easier for academics and researchers to access and use research articles, data and other research outputs. This can lead to the new research being undertaken, the development of new insights and the acceleration of the pace of scientific discovery.
- Complying with policies: In many cases research funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) or the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) must comply with Open Access policies and Australian universities agreed strive for publicly funded research outputs to be F.A.I.R. – findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Researchers at universities can contact their library or copyright units for support.
- Supporting Open Knowledge and “the commons”: By licensing your research outputs under CC academics and researchers are contributing to Open Knowledge movements such as Open Science, Open Data and Open Access. Licensing publicly funding research helps to build “the commons” – a rich body of material freely available for legal sharing, reuse and remixing by anyone.
- Aligning with academic values: CC licenses are conceptually aligned with many of the shared core values of academia, such as openness, collaboration and the sharing of knowledge.
- Finding content you can reuse: There’s lots of research outputs you can use. CC helps you share, reuse and remix licensed research content with confidence. Finding CC-licensed materials has helpful information on how to find licensed content.
If you are an Australian researchers interested in CC you can:
- Learn more about CC: We have information about finding and reusing CC materials, as well as information about the licences and deciding which is right for you.
- Licence your research: You can add a CC licence to your research outputs yourself, or make research material available through an outlet that adopts CC licences such as Open Access journals. If you aren’t sure which licence is right for you the interactive CC Chooser can help you decide. If you are new to licensing material using CC we recommend getting farmiliar with the considerations for licensors.
- Search for CC-licensed content: CC-licensed content you can share, reuse and remix can be found all over the internet. Finding CC-licensed materials has helpful information on how to find licensed content.
- Let us know about your research: Share your CC experience on social media using the #CCinAU hashtag when you post on social media or by contacting us. We might even feature it!