Getting to know Creative Commons licences is important when choosing to reuse images or other content in your research outputs, whether they are journal articles, posters, or presentations. Here’s a handy guide to the suite of Creative Commons licences to help you and take a look at the Creative Commons website; it is a great source of information, as well as home to their ever growing CC Search portal. Any content that has been released under a CC licence should have a statement or an icon that indicates which licence applies. You will find this detail in a variety of places within journal articles, as you can see in the examples below. If you decide to use an image, graph, or a graphic from papers released under a CC licence, follow the terms of the licence and credit them appropriately.

Images from photo hosting sites such as Flickr, Wikipedia, Unsplash, Pixabay etc. make their licences clear. Flickr, for instance, allows you to search and filter by Creative Commons licence type and details of the licence will be on the image main page.

Follow the terms of the licence and credit the creator. See the example below: –

Droid Gingerbread. https://flic.kr/p/9WkVzT This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

If you have any questions about Creative Commons or copyright in general, please get in touch with us and look out for a copyright training session for postgraduate researchers in the autumn term!  library-research-support@open.ac.uk