This month, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) shared its new open access policy. This new policy is a welcome initiative that will increase opportunities for the findings of publicly funded research to be accessed, shared and reused.

As part of our work supporting efforts in the creation, adoption and implementation of open access policies with various institutions, Creative Commons (CC) was pleased to lend its knowledge to assist UKRI in developing its open access policy as part of the Open Access Review last year. Generally, CC is committed to the goal of ensuring that the public is able to access immediately, free of charge, and without restriction, the peer-reviewed research articles and academic books resulting from publicly funded research. We are pleased to see that the comments we provided back in May 2020 have been taken into account in the review process. We are especially glad to see that key requirements of the new policy include immediate open access for research articles and the release of publications under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY) (CC BY ND by exception only*).

CC licenses and tools have become the standard in research publication open licensing. They are free, easy-to-use, simple and standardized licenses that enable researchers to share the articles or monographs they wrote with everyone, worldwide, on the conditions that they determine. In practice, this means research articles and data can be freely reused by others, thereby enhancing collaboration among researchers, accelerating the pace of scientific discovery, and facilitating the dissemination of reliable, practical information to the public.

For guidance on implementing an open access policy or using the CC License Suite, please contact us at info@creativecommons.org—we’re here to help.

*At CC, we believe that the use of CC BY ND licenses should not be encouraged for open access publishing, because those licenses restrict standard reuses that researchers and the general public need to be able to do in order to maximize the benefit of research outputs, such as adaptations for a different readership or translation into other languages. By contrast, CC BY-licensed research can be translated into other languages, adapted for use as open educational resources in the classroom, or shared widely on other platforms that champion the spread of knowledge, such as Wikipedia.