RightsLink

How the RightsLink workflow works in practice

RightsLink is embedded directly on the item page it covers — typically as a “Get Rights and Content,” “Reuse Content,” or “Request Permissions” control placed near the title, author list, and DOI. Clicking it hands the reader off to a CCC-hosted form rather than a manual email to the publisher. The reader selects the specific intended use — academic coursepack, republishing a figure or table in a new publication, translation, thesis inclusion, corporate training material, and so on — and the system returns either a generated price and a printable/emailable license, or, for many non-commercial academic reuses, a no-fee license issued automatically. Requests that fall outside the standard rule set (unusual formats, bulk reuse, ambiguous rights ownership) are routed to the publisher’s own rights department for manual review before a license is issued.

CCC (Copyright Clearance Center) was established in 1978 and is based in Danvers, Massachusetts; RightsLink itself was introduced in 2000 as CCC’s automated permission-and-reprint system. CCC operates as a licensing intermediary: it retains a commission on the fees it collects (commonly cited around 15%) and remits the majority of the remainder to the rightsholder (typically the publisher, sometimes the author depending on the copyright transfer or license terms in place). RightsLink is widely licensed across STM and scholarly publishing — publisher-side documentation confirms it in use on Elsevier/ScienceDirect, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Oxford University Press platforms, among others — which is why it shows up as a near-identical button across a large share of the journal and book-chapter pages a researcher encounters.

RightsLink is a copyright-clearance tool — it does not apply to CC-licensed open content

RightsLink exists to solve a specific problem: content is copyright-protected, all rights reserved (or reserved subject to a copyright transfer agreement), and a would-be reuser needs the rightsholder’s permission before reusing it beyond what fair use/fair dealing already allows. That is a fundamentally different situation from content published under a Creative Commons license. A CC-BY (or CC0, or CC-BY-NC) licensed article or dataset has already granted reuse permission in advance, subject to the license’s own conditions — typically attribution, and for CC-BY-NC, a non-commercial-use restriction. There is no CCC transaction to clear, no fee to calculate, and no license to request through RightsLink for that content; the reuser’s obligation is simply to comply with the stated CC license terms (cite correctly, note any modifications, respect NC/SA conditions where present). See CASRAI’s guide to Creative Commons licenses for research data (CC0 vs CC-BY vs CC-BY-NC) for how those license variants differ and which one governs a given reuse.

In practice this means the presence or absence of a RightsLink/“Get Rights and Content” button is itself a signal: its presence indicates traditionally-copyrighted, permission-gated content; its absence on an open-access page usually indicates the content is already openly licensed and a permission-clearance step is unnecessary (though the reuser should still confirm the specific license, since some open-access content carries a more restrictive CC variant, e.g. CC-BY-NC-ND, than a reuser might assume).

Related CASRAI vocabulary

• Copyright — the underlying legal right RightsLink clears permission against.
• Copyright transfer agreement — the mechanism by which a publisher typically comes to hold the rights RightsLink licenses on their behalf.
• Reuse license — the broader concept of a license instrument granting reuse rights, of which both a RightsLink-issued permission and a CC license are instances.
• Creative Commons licenses for research data — the CASRAI guide covering the open-licensing alternative that does not require a RightsLink transaction.