Editorial commentary
On this site, licence means the specific sense used in scholarly publishing: the legal terms under which a published work — an article, a dataset, a preprint, or another research output — may be reused, redistributed, or built upon by someone other than the rights holder. In practice this almost always means a Creative Commons licence attached at the point of publication or deposit, and it is worth stating that scope explicitly because “licence” is a genuinely ambiguous, overloaded word even inside a single university: a software licence agreement, an institutional site licence for journal access, and a publishing licence are three unrelated things that happen to share a name.
What a publishing licence actually grants
A licence in this sense does not usually transfer copyright — the author or their institution typically retains it — but grants specific reuse permissions to the public or to a publisher. The most common vehicle is a Creative Commons licence, built from four elements (Attribution, ShareAlike, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives) combined into six standard variants from most to least permissive: CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-ND, and CC BY-NC-ND. Many funders now require CC BY specifically as a condition of grant-funded open-access publication (cOAlition S’s Plan S is the clearest example, permitting CC BY-SA or CC0 as alternatives and CC BY-ND only by exception), because it imposes the fewest restrictions on reuse. A related but separate mechanism is a rights retention strategy, under which an author or their institution applies an open licence to their own accepted manuscript independent of whatever licence the publisher’s version of record carries.
What “licence” does not mean here
Three adjacent uses of the word are deliberately out of scope for this term and are covered separately. A software licence agreement governs the terms under which code may be used, modified, or distributed (MIT, GPL, Apache, and similar) — Creative Commons explicitly recommends against applying its standard licences to source code, since they lack the patent and source-code provisions software licensing needs, though CC0 is endorsed for dedicating software to the public domain; see the site’s coverage of open source software licensing in technology transfer for that sense. A university’s institutional or “site” licence with a publisher is a subscription-access contract controlling who can read paywalled content, unrelated to reuse rights on already-open material. And in the UK, general intellectual-property licensing questions (patents, trademarks) are the remit of the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), not a publishing-licence question at all.
Encountering it in a research office
A research office typically deals with publishing licences at two points: advising an author which licence a given funder mandate requires before submission, and checking a signed publishing agreement to confirm the licence it grants actually matches funder policy — a mismatch (for example, a publisher defaulting to CC BY-NC when the funder requires CC BY) is one of the more common compliance gaps caught late, at reporting stage rather than before submission.
References
- Creative Commons, “About CC Licenses” (creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses).
- cOAlition S, Plan S / Rights Retention Strategy FAQ (coalition-s.org).
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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