Permissions and Open Licenses
As a copyright owner, keep in mind the purpose of copyright that we have emphasized throughout this book: the dissemination and promotion of knowledge. Be generous with copyright permissions. Letting others use the works your library publishes will increase the social benefits of your publishing efforts. A good way to grant copyright permissions is through open licenses. Think of these like copyright notices, but for granting permission rather than reserving rights. By using an open license, you grant blanket permission to anyone who wishes to use your works, subject to conditions prescribed by you.
There are number of open licenses, but by far the most well-known are those made by Creative Commons.[1] By attaching a Creative Commons license, you give permission to anyone to reproduce, distribute, perform, display, and make derivative works from your works as long as the conditions in the license are followed. The most common conditions are attribution (giving proper credit to the original author and publisher), non-commercial (not selling or using the work directly for profit), share-alike (licensing any derivative works under the same open license), and noderivatives (no making derivative works). Some copyright owners grant blanket permission only for educational use, such as course packs or copies for classroom distribution.
For example, a book with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license permits reproducing and distributing the book as long as proper attribution is given, the use is non-commercial, and a derivative work is not made. This is the most restrictive of the Creative Commons licenses; other varieties permit derivative works or commercial use.
All Creative Commons licenses require attribution, but if an owner wants to waive all copyrights, then she can use Creative Commons' CC0 (as in Creative Commons Zero) Public Domain Dedication. The most common use of CC0 is for data sets that can be aggregated and mixed with other data for scientific analysis.
