In the UK, the House of Commons has asked for feedback on their Open Access Policy. One provision of that policy requires that articles funded through the Research Councils UK (RCUK) must be released under a CC BY license. Last year, CC submitted a short comment in support.

And just last month, the House of Lords completed a consultation period which has generated some misinformation about how the CC BY license operates. So, in order to clarify some of these misconceptions, Creative Commons and Creative Commons UK submitted a joint response to the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee to set the record straight.

We’ve pulled together some clarifications to some of the uncertainty lobbed at the CC BY license provision in the Open Access Policy. Some of the reasons given that CC BY should not be retained include:

• it would promote “misuse of research or would cause authors to “lose control of their work”
• third party rights negotiations for content that authors wish to include within an openly licensed article would prove too difficult
• open licensing provides less protection against plagiarism
• CC BY is not widely used in OA publishing
• authors should choose licensing conditions, not funders

These claims are confusing, misguided, or not backed up by evidence. We offer our responses and support here.