Publishing and copyright licences: academics opt to keep control

More than half of 13,000 authors who have recently published in Taylor & Francis journals singled out the permissive CC-BY licence as their least favourite under which to publish their research.

This licence is often used in open-access publishing and allows authors’ work to be used in multiple ways as long as credit is given.

Under its open-access policy, this is also the licence that Research Councils UK requires for the research it funds, when work is made open access via the “gold” journal-based route.

Meanwhile, the option of “exclusive licence to publish”, under which the author allows the journal to publish but retains copyright, was the most popular method among academics.

The CC BY-NC-ND licence, the most restrictive of Creative Commons licences available, was the next most popular in the survey, which was carried out at the end of 2012 and in early 2013.

elizabeth.gibney@tsleducation.com