Creative Commons licences
Open access literature is published under public copyright licenses (such as Creative Commons licenses). By using a Creative Commons license for your publication, you retain all of your rights, but give others permission to disseminate the work, share it with others and – with some licenses – to edit the work. With a choice of six standard licenses (available free of charge), you can determine the extent to which and under what terms and conditions your work may be further distributed.
Most of our Open Access agreements require Max Planck authors to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).
Open Access means CC-BY
When publishing your research Open Access, choosing the right Creative Commons (CC) license is crucial. Among the various options, the DEAL-Konsortium recommends the CC BY (Attribution) license, because it stands out as the best choice for maximizing the impact and reach of your work. See here to read further info
CC-BY license
The Max Planck Society, the Alliance of German Science Organizations and cOAlition S encourage authors to choose, wherever possible, the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) for their published works.
While authors have traditionally transferred all rights over their works to publishers, under the CC-BY license authors keep the right to re-use their own work and freely and legally share their published articles. Hence the CC-BY license fruits the greatest possible impact and use and re-use of your research, enabling scholars and scientists everywhere to learn from and build on the results of your research and increasing the potential of digital technologies in research, such as text and data mining, while ensuring that you as the author are always given credit as the creator of the work. This is why you should always use CC-BY without additional restrictive attributions. Particularly the NC-attribution (=non-commercial) should be avoided as it is often unclear what constitutes commercial use and the NC-attribution is incompatible with re-use even on open content platforms like Wikipedia.
The Max Planck Society is working on establishing the CC-BY license as the gold standard in scholarly publishing. While the majority of journals included in the Max Planck Society’s Open Access agreements prompt authors to choose the CC-BY license by default, there are exceptions. In these cases, authors are encouraged to select the least restrictive Creative Commons license available.
Taking the opportunity to publish your article open access under the CC-BY license, you will contribute to a growing body of openly available research findings, enabling more profound, expansive and impactful studies, accelerating the process of science itself, whereby new discoveries are built upon previously established results.
Further information: click here.