Most articles that are published Open Access are labelled with a Creative Commons license that dictates how the article can be shared, and if it can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and/or built upon.

All the CC licenses require that the copyright owners must be cited. In addition to this, the different combinations allow for varying degrees of openness. Please find detailed information and explanation of the licenses on the Creative Commons organization’s pages. See also more detailed information on the University of Oslo’s pages (in Norwegian).

For Plan S projects, it is a requirement that authors or their institutions retain copyright to their publications, and that publications must be published under an open license, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license. This license allows others to distribute, modify, remix, and build on the work, including for commercial purposes, if the original authors are cited. cOAlition S will, as secondary alternatives, accept the use of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, and use of the public domain dedication, CC0. RCN may approve the use of the CC BY-ND license for individual articles, if this is explicitly requested by the project leader and justified by RCN.

UNIS recommends UNIS authors to use the CC BY license also on articles that are not published in a Plan S project.

Find a description of the different licenses here.