Education and research

A Creative Commons license grants advance permission to do certain things with a work. Citing your source is a separate professional obligation. Your university's ethics board imposes its own requirements. A grant agreement may demand open access on specific terms. National fair-dealing or fair-use provisions can authorise a use even when no license covers it. Keep each of these layers distinct, and check every one before you rely on a CC license alone.

• License condition: Attribution (BY) is required by every one of the six 4.0 International licenses. The reuser must retain, when supplied, the creator, copyright notice, license reference, warranty disclaimer and a link to the work, and must link or refer to the license and indicate modifications.
• Decisive exception: Exceptions and limitations to copyright, fair use, fair dealing and their equivalents, operate separately from the license. If an exception authorises the use, the license's conditions do not apply to that use. Their scope varies by jurisdiction.
• Safest next step: Open the original source page, record the exact license and version from the deed, confirm your intended activity against the NC, ND and SA conditions, preserve a screenshot, attribute in a reasonable manner, and then check institutional policy and funder rules separately.

The Six Standard Licenses

All six 4.0 licenses require attribution. Beyond that they differ in how much reuse they permit. CC BY 4.0 is the most permissive: share, adapt, use commercially. It is the standard choice for open educational resources where you want the widest possible distribution. CC BY-SA 4.0 adds ShareAlike. Any adapted work you share must carry the same license or one Creative Commons has formally named as compatible. CC BY-ND 4.0 lets you share the work unchanged, including commercially, but you may not share an adaptation. Private adaptations for personal study are fine. The adapted version cannot be distributed under the license.

NonCommercial Restrictions

The NonCommercial licenses, CC BY-NC 4.0, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, restrict use to purposes not primarily intended toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation. The identity of the user, a university, a nonprofit, a business, does not by itself decide the issue. Advertising, sponsorship, fundraising and internal business use each require context. If your planned use carries material commercial risk, get separate permission or local legal advice.

The Two Public-Domain Tools

CC0 and the Public Domain Mark are not part of the six-license suite. CC0 is a public-domain dedication that aims to remove copyright and related-right conditions as far as the affirmer is legally able. The Public Domain Mark changes no rights and is appropriate only for works believed free of known copyright restrictions worldwide. Neither tool guarantees that privacy, publicity, trademark, patent, contract or cultural-heritage law permits your use.

Under version 4.0, a reuser must retain, when supplied by the licensor: identification of the creator and designated attribution parties; a copyright notice; a notice referring to the license; a warranty disclaimer; and a URI or hyperlink to the work where reasonably practicable. The reuser must link or refer to the license and indicate modifications, preserving earlier modification notices. This may be done in any reasonable manner for the medium.

The TASL mnemonic, title, author, source, license, is a useful reminder but is not the complete legal text of the 4.0 attribution clause. Version 4.0 does not separately require the work's title. Including it is good practice and older versions may require it when supplied. Academic citation serves a different purpose: it credits intellectual debt, enables verification and supports research integrity. License attribution grants permission. Do both when both apply.

A consolidated credits page can be reasonable for many works if the work-to-credit mapping is clear and the credits remain readily accessible. Do not imply endorsement through the attribution.

Version 4.0 defines NonCommercial as not primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation. A university library digitising a CC BY-NC work for its course reserves is almost certainly within scope, because the activity is not directed toward commercial gain. A university press that sells access to the same digitised collection at a profit has crossed the line. Advertising, sponsorship and fundraising around a resource that uses NC material require careful judgement.

If your use of a CC BY-NC work sits near the boundary, a research centre that accepts corporate sponsorship, a professional development course that charges a fee, document your reasoning. If the risk is material, contact the licensor for separate permission or use a different license. The licensor can waive the NC condition for a particular user without changing the public CC offer.

Collections Versus Adaptations

A collection keeps separate works separate, unchanged essays in an anthology. Each work retains its own license. The collection's overall license does not replace those licenses. Adapted Material is based on and modifies the licensed work in a way requiring copyright permission. Only the contribution made by the adapter is covered by the adapter's license. Notices for the original must remain.

When ShareAlike Bites

ShareAlike is triggered only when Adapted Material is shared, not when unchanged work merely appears beside other separate works in a collection. The adapter applies the license named by the applicable SA clause or an officially designated compatible license. Do not assume two SA licenses are compatible. The official compatibility list controls. Creative Commons lists one-way compatibility from BY-SA 4.0 to GPLv3 for adapted work. This does not turn a CC license into a software license or create compatibility in the reverse direction.

Combining work is not automatically lawful because each input uses a CC license. ND may block sharing the combination if it is an adaptation. SA may require a specific adapter's license. Two inputs can impose incompatible terms. Use the official compatibility chart and distinguish mere aggregation from an integrated adaptation.

Reproduction in a different format alone does not create Adapted Material under the 4.0 definition. Translation is normally an adaptation. Synchronising music with a moving image is expressly Adapted Material under 4.0. Whether cropping, excerpting, editing or combining creates an adaptation depends on applicable copyright law. Do not declare a universal boundary.

When you adapt a CC-licensed work, only your new contribution is covered by your own CC license. The original work remains under the original license and its conditions. You must indicate modifications and preserve earlier modification notices. If the original used BY-SA, your adaptation must be shared under BY-SA or a compatible license. If the original used ND, you may make a private adaptation but you cannot share it.

The 10 guides beneath this hub each start from a specific question. Deciding which license to apply to your own work? Read the guide on choosing and applying a Creative Commons tool. Reusing a work and need to know what to record and how to attribute? The reuse workflow guide covers that. Combining multiple resources into a literature review? The adaptation and compatibility guide explains when your combination creates Adapted Material and which license it must carry. Working with data? Separate rights in the database structure from rights in individual contents, privacy and ethics duties, and contractual access terms. The data and databases guide handles that.

For platform-specific questions, what YouTube's CC option really covers, how to read an article's exact license on a journal site, whether a repository's terms conflict with the license, the platform, education and research guide addresses each. And if you need to correct a non-compliant use or respond to a complaint, the disputes guide walks through preservation of evidence, identification of the exact condition, and the 30-day cure period.

This section serves anyone who creates or reuses educational and research material under a Creative Commons license: lecturers building open courseware, researchers publishing data, students compiling portfolios, librarians managing institutional repositories, and journal editors navigating funder mandates. The guidance on attribution, the NC condition, adaptation and compatibility applies across all six 4.0 licenses and the two public-domain tools.

If your question is about software code, do not apply a CC license to it. Use a recognised free or open-source software license suited to source code, patents and distribution. If your question is about trademark permission, a CC license does not grant that. If your question requires a country-specific legal conclusion about fair use, fair dealing or copyright duration, you need qualified legal advice. This site cannot give it. And if you have a dispute that involves more than a straightforward attribution error, preserve the evidence and consult a lawyer familiar with the jurisdiction where the use occurred.