Reuse license

A reuse license is the specific set of terms and conditions under which a licensor grants others permission to reuse published information — typically a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and often perpetual grant covering rights to copy, publish, distribute, and transmit the material; to adapt it; and to exploit it both commercially and non-commercially, including combining it with other information or incorporating it into a new product or application. These broad grants are usually conditioned on the licensee meeting specified obligations, most commonly attribution — crediting the original source — but sometimes also requiring that adaptations be shared under the same terms, or restricting commercial exploitation.

How this differs from a specific licence

“Reuse licence” is a general category, not a single named licence: the Creative Commons family (CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC0, and the rest) is the most widely used set of standard, off-the-shelf reuse licences in scholarly publishing, but a reuse licence can equally be a bespoke set of terms a publisher or repository writes itself, an open-data licence such as the Open Database License, or a permissive software licence attached to research code. What all of them share is that they are the mechanism by which the underlying copyright or database right holder grants reuse permissions that would otherwise default to “all rights reserved.”

For a research administrator, the operational question a reuse licence answers is not whether a work is accessible — that is a question of open access route (see green and gold open access) — but what a reader is actually permitted to do with it once accessed. A dataset or article can be freely readable while still being restrictively licensed, and conversely a clearly licensed work is not useful if it cannot actually be found or accessed. See CASRAI's guide on describing reuse rights and permissions for a shared dataset for how to write these terms clearly.