What Creative Commons (CC) Do…
“Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation dedicated to building a globally-accessible public commons of knowledge and culture. We make it easier for people to share their creative and academic work, as well as to access and build upon the work of others...”

In order to achieve their mission, they:
Provide Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools that give every person and organisation in the world a free, simple, and standardised way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works; ensure proper attribution; and allow others to copy, distribute, and make use of those works.

Find out more about Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licensing

Open access (OA) refers to free, unrestricted, online access to resources which are free to re-use (with some restrictions i.e ‘some rights reserved’).

Open access applies when the rights holder has made their work available on an open licence. This can relate to research outputs, such as journal articles and books, as well as teaching resources.

The standardised way of making resources available on an open access basis is via Creative Commons Licences. There are 4 primary licence elements which are mixed to create offer a suite of 6 licences as shpwn in the image below. Each element has its own icon and abbreviation, making them easy to identify.