Amber Tear, Oxford PharmaGenesis, UK; Valérie Philippon, UCB Inc., USA; Sonia Schweers, Bristol Myers Squibb, USA; Slávka Baróniková,Galápagos NV, Belgium; Jill Shuman, Life Science Communication, USA; Joana Osório,Oxford PharmaGenesis, UK
Email your questions and comments on this article to TheMAP@ismpp.org.
What are Creative Commons licenses?
Have you ever published a journal article open access? If so, you might be familiar with Creative Commons (CC) licenses.1 This series of copyright licenses was designed as an alternative to standard copyright models, allowing authors to retain copyright of their work while setting the conditions for the reuse of the work.2
CC licenses allow authors to understand exactly how their content can be reused (e.g. whether it can be adapted for future use, whether it can be used for commercial purposes).
How do CC licenses work in the context of scientific research publications?
Under traditional publishing models, copyright is signed over to the journal. Anyone who wishes to reuse the content, including figures and tables, must request permission from the publisher and usually pay a fee.
Pharmaceutical companies regularly reuse their published content for multiple purposes, including medical information requests, educational materials, conference presentations, and promotional activities. If the content they are reusing falls under the traditional copyright model, frequent reuse can incur substantial long-term costs from publisher fees and may also cause delays.
In open access publishing, a journal publisher may offer authors the ability to publish content under one of several CC licenses, paid for by an article processing charge. When selecting a CC license, it is critical to consider the intended use of the materials in question, as well as the needs and priorities of your organization.
CC license selection is generally permanent, and choosing a suboptimal license can have long-term implications both for content control and reuse. A license that permits unrestricted reuse can reduce both the administrative burden of requesting copyright permissions and the cost of content reuse. As an example, choosing an unrestricted license allows anyone to adapt or modify the content for commercial and non-commercial purposes. However, publishers may request a higher fee for less restrictive CC licenses to offset loss of income from content reuse requests.
There are six main CC license types, four of which (CC BY, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC, and CC BY-NC-ND) are frequently encountered by authors of research articles.3 Figure 1 details these licenses and provides guidance on how to select the best license for your use case.
Figure 1: Selecting a CC license4
BY, Attribution (i.e., credit must be given to the creator); CC, Creative Commons; N, no; NC, NonCommercial; ND, NonDerivative; SA, ShareAlike; Y, yes.
What CC licenses are typically available?
In reality, most publishers only offer one or two CC license types for open access publications. Of the top 50 medical journals by Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) (Figure 2a), just over half offer at least one type of CC license, regardless of funder organization. Of those, more than half currently restrict their license offerings for industry-funded research.
Despite these restrictions, over two-thirds of research funded by the top 40 pharmaceutical companies was published via green or gold open access in 20225 (Figure 2b), and 28% of pharmaceutical company research published open access between 2019 and 2020 had a CC BY license.6
Figure 2a: CC license offerings in the top 50 medical journals by SJR
A manual search of author information was performed for each of the top 50 medical journals by SJR to identify current open access and CC license offerings.
BY, Attribution (i.e., credit must be given to the creator); CC, Creative Commons; NC, NonCommercial; ND, NonDerivative; SA, share alike; SJR, Scimago Journal Rank.
Figure 2b: Open access publishing rates5 and CC license selection6 among the top pharmaceutical companies
BY, Attribution (i.e., credit must be given to the creator); CC, Creative Commons; NC, NonCommercial; ND, NonDerivative; OA, open access.
Many non-industry research funders have open access mandates that detail the conditions in which their research must be published. Some mandates indicate a license preference (e.g. CC Attribution [BY]). In Europe, these mandates are typically listed on Sherpa Juliet,7 a searchable database of funder policies, and are broadly respected by most publishers.
Several pharmaceutical companies also have open access mandates, some of which include a preference to publish under a CC BY license wherever possible. Publisher responses to these open access commitments have been variable. Some publishers offer the same licenses to all authors regardless of funding source, whereas others allow industry-funded or industry-led research to only be published under CC BY-NC (NonCommercial) or CC BY-NC-ND (NonDerivative) licenses, regardless of whether the funders have an open access mandate.8 Other publishers, however, might offer the option to publish under a CC BY license if any of the authors is affiliated with an academic organization that has an open access mandate, even if the research has been funded or partially funded by a pharmaceutical company.
Unlike CC BY licenses, CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-ND licenses do not allow commercial content reuse and/or adaptation without permission and usually require payment of a fee for each use. It is therefore critical to consider CC license selection and its implications when choosing a target journal to avoid any unexpected disappointment or obstacles. It is also critical to educate authors as to the meaning of the various available licenses and avoid the unintended loss of copyright.
How does CC license selection work in practice?
CC license selection can be a complex process, in part owing to challenges interpreting license conditions, which are intentionally vague to cover a wide range of use cases (e.g. music, images, videos). Figure 3 details a real-life case study of CC license selection in the context of industry-funded research.
Figure 3: Case study – CC license selection
BY, Attribution (i.e., credit must be given to the creator); CC, Creative Commons; NC, NonCommercial; ND, NonDerivative.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Sam Cavana, Taylor & Francis, for reviewing a draft of this article and making helpful suggestions.
Editing support was provided by Velissaria Vanna, Oxford PharmaGenesis.
This work was supported by Open Pharma. Open Pharma is a multi-sponsor collaborative project at and facilitated by Oxford PharmaGenesis. At the time of this work, Open Pharma received sponsorship funding from Alfasigma S.p.A., Astellas Pharma Inc., AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP, Boehringer Ingelheim International GmbH, Bristol Myers Squibb, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Galápagos NV, Gilead Sciences, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals SA, Ipsen Biopharm Ltd, Janssen Scientific Affairs, LLC, a Johnson & Johnson Company, Novartis Pharma AG, Novo Nordisk A/S, Pfizer Inc., Takeda Development Center Americas, Inc., Taylor & Francis (part of Informa PLC) and UCB Biopharma SRL.
References
- Creative Commons. Available from: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/ (Accessed 12 February 2024).
- Shuman J. Copyright and open access in the life sciences: a researcher’s guide to sharing and publishing scientific information. Emerg Top Life Sci 2018;2:779–84.
- ISMPP. 2019. A multistakeholder discussion on open access and medical publishing. Available from: https://www.ismpp.org/assets/docs/Inititives/White_Papers/ISMPP_OA_White_Paper.pdf (Accessed 15 March 2024).
- Open Pharma. 2023. Open access objection handler. Available from: https://www.openpharma.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Open-access-objection-handler_01Nov23.pdf (Accessed 12 February 2024).
- Philippon V, Liew A, Baróniková S, et al. [poster]. Benchmarking open access in publications with authors affiliated to pharma companies and universities. Presented at the 19th Annual Meeting of ISMPP, 24–26 April 2023, Washington, DC, USA.
- Bevan E, Koder T, Philippon V, et al. [poster]. Open access and copyright license status of pharmaceutical company-supported articles. Presented at the 9th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication, 8–10 September 2022, Chicago, IL, USA.
- Sherpa Juliet. Available from: https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/about.html (Accessed 12 February 2024).
- Ellison TS, Koder T, Schmidt L et al. Open access policies of leading medical journals: a cross-sectional study. BMJ Open 2019;9:e028655. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2018-028655.