CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: CC BY

  • Funder open-access mandates: Plan S, rights retention and what authors must do

    An increasing number of research funders now attach a condition to their grants that catches many authors by surprise: the resulting publications must be made openly available, immediately, with no embargo. The most influential of these mandates is Plan S, and its mechanisms — particularly its rights retention strategy — change what an author can and cannot sign away to a publisher. This is a matter of knowledge equity as much as compliance, because immediate open access determines who can read publicly funded research; it belongs to the knowledge-equity domain. The companion explainer on what Plan S is sets out the background; this article is the practical version, and the guidance on funder requirements is the natural next stop.

    What Plan S requires

    Plan S was launched in 2018 by cOAlition S, a consortium of research funders, and its core principle is short: with effect from its start date, all scholarly publications resulting from research funded by participating funders must be made immediately open access — with no embargo period — under an open licence. The emphasis on immediate is the heart of it. Many traditional arrangements allowed open access only after a delay of six, twelve, or more months; Plan S removes that delay for funded work. The default open licence the coalition asks for is Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), which permits reuse with attribution, though some other CC licences may be permitted in defined circumstances.

    It is worth being precise about scope. Plan S binds authors funded by participating funders; it is not a universal law of publishing. But because the participating funders include major national and charitable research funders, a large and growing share of researchers are affected, and the practical reach is wide.

    The three compliant routes

    cOAlition S recognises more than one way to satisfy the mandate, and an author generally has a choice of route:

    • Publish in an open-access venue. Publish in a fully open-access journal or platform that makes the article immediately available under a compliant licence. Where such a venue charges an article processing charge, some funders provide funds to cover it; many compliant venues, including diamond open-access journals, charge nothing at all.
    • Publish in a subscription journal and self-archive (the green route). Publish in a subscription or hybrid journal but deposit the author’s accepted manuscript in a repository, made openly available immediately on publication under an open licence, with no embargo. This is where rights retention becomes essential, because subscription publishers have traditionally required exactly the embargo that Plan S forbids.
    • Publish under a transformative arrangement. Publish in a journal covered by a transformative agreement that is recognised as a route toward full open access, within the timeline cOAlition S has set for such arrangements.

    The rights retention strategy

    The route that most changes an author’s habits is the second, and the mechanism that makes it work is the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS). The problem it solves is a contractual one. Historically, on acceptance an author signs a publishing agreement that transfers copyright, or grants an exclusive licence, to the publisher — after which the author no longer has the right to make the accepted manuscript openly available without embargo. The RRS reverses the order of operations.

    Under the strategy, the author attaches a notice to the manuscript at submission declaring that, as a condition of their funding, a CC BY licence is applied to the author accepted manuscript (and any earlier versions), and that this prior licence takes precedence over any later agreement with the publisher. Because the licence is asserted before the publishing contract is signed, the author retains the right to deposit the accepted manuscript openly and immediately, regardless of what the publisher’s standard agreement says about embargoes. In effect, the funder’s open-access condition is converted into a right the author keeps rather than a right they sign away. Many funders provide standard wording for the submission notice and require it as a grant condition.

    What an author actually has to do

    1. Check whether your funder is part of cOAlition S — or imposes an equivalent immediate-open-access mandate — before you choose where to submit. The requirement attaches to the funding, so identify it early.
    2. Choose a compliant route. An immediate open-access venue, the green self-archiving route with rights retention, or a recognised transformative arrangement — whichever fits your paper and your funder’s terms.
    3. If using the green route, apply the rights retention notice at submission. This is the step that preserves your right to self-archive without embargo; applying it after signing the publishing agreement is too late. Use your funder’s prescribed wording.
    4. Deposit the accepted manuscript in an appropriate repository, openly available on publication under the required licence, with the correct version and metadata.
    5. Record the funding and licence in the metadata — including the funder, the grant, and the licence — so that the output’s open-access status and its link back to the award are machine-readable.

    Why this is a knowledge-equity question

    Open-access mandates are sometimes treated as mere administrative compliance, but their purpose is substantive: research paid for by the public, or by charitable funders acting in the public interest, should be readable by the public — by clinicians, by policymakers, by researchers at institutions that cannot afford large subscriptions, and by readers in countries where paywalls are an insurmountable barrier. Immediate open access, under a licence that permits reuse, is what makes funded knowledge genuinely available rather than nominally published. That is why the topic sits in the knowledge-equity domain rather than being filed away as paperwork: the mandate is an equity instrument with a contractual mechanism.

    Where shared vocabulary fits

    “Plan S”, “rights retention”, “accepted manuscript”, “embargo”, “CC BY”, and “transformative agreement” are used inconsistently and are easily confused, and a misunderstanding about which version may be deposited, or when, can put an author out of compliance without their realising it. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these terms precisely — and points back to cOAlition S and the licence stewards — is what lets open-access guidance from one funder be understood alongside another’s. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play; the relevant terms sit in the knowledge-equity domain.

    Related reading

  • Licensing research data: CC-BY, CC0 and when to use each

    You can deposit a dataset in a trusted repository, describe it with rich metadata, and give it a DOI — and still leave it effectively unusable, because you forgot the one line that tells a reuser what they are allowed to do with it. A dataset without a clear licence is data nobody can confidently build on: a careful researcher, unsure of the terms, will simply not reuse it. Licensing is therefore not a legal afterthought but the part of the data-infrastructure domain that determines whether a deposit delivers the “R” in FAIR at all. This guide explains the main choices — principally CC0 and CC BY — and when each fits.

    Why a licence is the reusability switch

    The FAIR principles ask that data be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable — and reusability rests explicitly on data being “released with a clear and accessible data usage licence”. Without a licence, default copyright and database rights leave the legal status ambiguous, and ambiguity is fatal to reuse: a would-be user cannot tell whether combining your data with theirs, redistributing it, or building a tool on it is permitted. An explicit, standard, machine-readable licence resolves that uncertainty in advance, for everyone, without anyone having to ask. That is why “attach an explicit licence” is the step that turns a findable dataset into a reusable one.

    The two main choices for data

    CC0 — the public-domain dedication

    CC0 is a Creative Commons tool by which the rights-holder waives, to the fullest extent the law allows, all copyright and related rights in the work — placing it as close to the public domain as possible. For data, CC0 means a reuser can use, combine, modify, and redistribute the data with no conditions at all, including no obligation to attribute. This is widely recommended as the default for research data, and for a specific reason: data are routinely aggregated from many sources, and attribution requirements that stack up across hundreds of datasets (“attribution stacking”) can become legally and practically unworkable. CC0 removes that friction entirely and maximises interoperability. Several major data repositories and infrastructures apply CC0 by default for exactly this reason.

    Importantly, CC0 waives legal requirements, not scholarly norms. Citing the data you use remains an academic and ethical expectation regardless of the licence — CC0 simply means that expectation is enforced by the norms of good scholarship rather than by copyright law.

    CC BY — attribution required

    CC BY permits the same broad reuse — use, adaptation, redistribution, including commercially — but on the single condition that the original creator is credited. For data, CC BY is appropriate where attribution matters enough to be a legal condition, or where a funder or institution requires it. It is the most permissive of the conditional Creative Commons licences and is the default for many open-access publications. The trade-off relative to CC0 is precisely the attribution clause: it guarantees credit, but it reintroduces the attribution-stacking problem when many datasets are combined.

    Choosing between them

    • Prefer CC0 for data intended for the widest possible aggregation and reuse, especially where the data will be merged with many other sources. It maximises interoperability and removes legal friction; rely on citation norms for credit.
    • Choose CC BY where attribution must be a legal condition, where a funder or repository mandates it, or where the dataset is a discrete, citable product whose creators need enforceable credit.
    • Be cautious with more restrictive clauses. Non-commercial (NC) and No-Derivatives (ND) terms substantially limit reuse and can render data incompatible with other open data; they are generally discouraged for research data unless a specific ethical or legal constraint demands them.

    Data are not software: a critical caveat

    Creative Commons licences are designed for content — text, images, and data — and Creative Commons itself advises against using them for software. Software has needs that CC licences do not address: patent grants, the distinction between source and compiled code, and copyleft mechanics. For code, use a recognised software licence instead — a permissive one such as MIT, BSD, or Apache 2.0, or a copyleft one such as the GPL. If your deposit bundles a dataset and the code that processes it, licence each part appropriately: a CC licence (or CC0) for the data, an OSI-approved software licence for the code. Conflating the two is one of the most common licensing mistakes in research deposits.

    A practical checklist

    1. Confirm you have the right to licence the data. Check funder terms, any data-sharing agreements, third-party data within your dataset, and — for personal or sensitive data — consent and governance constraints. A licence cannot grant rights you do not hold.
    2. Default to CC0 for data unless there is a positive reason to require attribution; choose CC BY where there is.
    3. Licence software separately with an OSI-approved licence; never put code under a Creative Commons licence.
    4. State the licence explicitly in the deposit metadata and in any data availability statement, using the standard licence identifier so it is machine-readable.
    5. Cite the data you reuse regardless of its licence — the scholarly norm holds even when the law does not require it.

    How this connects to contribution and credit

    Licensing answers “what may be done with this output?”; it is a sibling of the question “who made it?”, which the CRediT taxonomy answers. A dataset’s intellectual work is recorded on the associated paper through roles such as Data curation and Investigation, while the licence governs downstream reuse of the artefact itself. Used together — a clear licence on the data and clear contribution roles on the people — they ensure both the dataset and its creators are properly accounted for.

    Where shared vocabulary fits

    “CC0”, “CC BY”, “public domain”, “attribution”, and “reuse” are interpreted differently across repositories and funders, which undermines the very interoperability that licensing is meant to enable. A shared, federated vocabulary that defines these terms precisely — pointing back to Creative Commons for the licences and to the FAIR principles for the reusability requirement — is what lets a licence chosen for one repository be understood correctly in another. Supplying that definitional layer is the role the CASRAI dictionary is designed to play; the relevant terms sit in the data-infrastructure domain.

    Related reading