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Scholarly Communications

In 2003, ACRL defined scholarly communication as "the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to to the scholarly community, and preserved."

About Creative Commons Licensing

 

Creative Commons licenses provide a way for people to share their work and make it available for others to build on and reuse.

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that works "to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in “the commons” — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing." 

Licensing your work

With Creative Commons licensing terms, if you own the copyright to your work, you can decide on if and how others can use that work by assigning a free Creative Commons license to it. This step is completely optional. Your choice of licenses determines:

  • Attribution (giving credit in a way you establish)
     
  • Sharing (those who use your content must use the same type of license you do)
     
  • Type of use (commercial vs non-commercial)
     
  • Derivatives (determines whether someone can make a derivative work from yours)

Fill out their questionnaire to quickly and easily determine your license for your work. Check out the Creative Commons website for more information.