A work is in the public domain when it is no longer protected by copyright law and is “public property”, usually when the copyright in a work expires. In the UK this is generally 70 years after the death of the author / creator, but there are exceptions. There is more detail here.
Sometimes the phrase “in the public domain” is incorrectly used to mean anyone can access it freely on the web!
Creative Commons offers two Public Domain licenses.
CCO
You are waiving all your copyrights to the work and others may use it as they wish. CC0 should not be used to mark works already free of known copyright and database restrictions and in the public domain throughout the world.
Public domain mark
If you have a work that is already in the Public Domain and you want to make this clear.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a global nonprofit organization that enables sharing and reuse of creativity and knowledge through the provision of free legal tools. See this short video. These legal tools are a range of standardized licenses designed to make it easy to share your own work and to use and build upon the work of others. The licenses enable content creators to specify what they will permit others to do with their work, while preserving their own copyright. Creative Commons licenses do not affect freedoms that the law grants to users of creative works otherwise protected by copyright, such as exceptions and limitations to copyright law like fair dealing.
The licenses
The licenses are made by combining four elements:
| BY Attribution | You must credit the author/s a requirement of all CC licences. |
| SA Share alike | The work can be modified and the resulting version can be published but only with the same licence. |
| NC Non-commercial | Commercial use is excluded. |
| ND No derivatives | Users can copy, distribute, perform and display the work, but they need permission from the creator(s) to make any changes |
These are combined to make six different licenses, which can be viewed here. Creative Commons also offers two public domain licenses. (See side box.) If you wish to share your work using a CC license there is a tool here to help you find the appropriate licence with a link to the chosen licence.
When a work is published in a standard author contract, you transfer/assign copyright to the journal publisher. Or you could, instead, grant an exclusive licence to publisher rather than assigning copyright. Taylor and Francis provide useful guidance.
For information on REF and Creative Commons see our Open Access Guide
Creative Commons and REF
The 2021 REF had an Open Access mandate that required that:
“…outputs licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Non-Derivative (CC BY-NC-ND) licence would meet the minimum requirement. From REF OA summary
But, if you have signed your rights over to the publisher the control rests with them. Copyright holders control the right to allow open access publication. You as an author are encouraged to seek a licence of copyright with a journal publisher rather than fully assigning copyright to a publisher. You can amend your agreement with the publisher before signing, by either; a) Adding an Author Addendum using a template such as that provided by SPARC or b) using a sample licence or inserting your own clauses such as those provided in the JISC Journals Contracts guidance. Otherwise an Article Processing Charge (APC) would have to be paid to the publisher to achieve Open Access status (using a CC-BY licence.)
UK Research Councils and Creative Commons
It is usual for research funding to require the research outputs be Open Access - using the CC-BY licence:
“Where Research Council funds are used to pay the APC for an Open Access paper, we require that the publisher makes the paper freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This is the standard licence used by open access journals, and supports the maximum dissemination and re‐use of published papers, whilst protecting the moral rights of authors. It allows others to distribute, remix, manipulate, and build upon a paper, including commercially, as long as they credit the authors for the original paper and do not infringe any copyrights to third‐party material included in the paper. The use of CC BY where an APC is paid is also the policy of the Wellcome Trust.”