Authors and publishers can grant varying degrees of open access for material they write and publish. Creative Commons licencing is one type of open-access licencing that enables authors to retain copyright of their work while determining what, if any, limits they want on its use and re-use.
Creative Commons provides a quick overview of its layered licences, and a Licence Chooser that can help authors decide which licence might be best for them.
For example, a Creative Commons Attribution licence lets anyone distribute, remix, tweak and build upon an author's work, even commercially, as long as the author is given credit for the original creation. By comparison, a more restrictive Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike licence lets users remix, tweak and build upon an author's work, as long as the use is non-commercial, credited, and licenced under identical Creative Commons terms.
Canadian Creative Commons Licences - includes a summary (licence deed), and legal code for each CC licence.
The following sources provide information about publisher policies with regard to self-archiving of scholarly articles. These sources are not comprehensive; in some cases it will be necessary to contact the journal publisher directly to ask about the policies that relate to a specific journal title.
"Journals require only your permission to
publish an article, not a wholesale transfer
of the full copyright interest. To promote
scholarly communication, autonomy, integrity
and academic freedom, and education
and research activities more generally, it is
important for academic staff to retain copyright in their journal articles."