CC BY vs CC BY-NC: Choosing an Open Access Licence

The licence is often picked in a hurry at acceptance. It decides who can translate, mine, reprint and adapt your paper, and whether your funder counts it as compliant.

Explainer · 10 min read · Directive Publications Editorial Team

What the licence on your article decides

The licence on an open access article is the set of permissions everyone receives in advance. It decides whether a health charity can post a translation, whether a company can put the full text in a commercial product, whether a textbook can reuse your figure, and whether your funder counts the paper as compliant. Nobody needs to ask you for anything it already allows.

Open access journals commonly use the Creative Commons licences, which combine four elements: BY (credit the creator), NC (non-commercial only), ND (no derivatives) and SA (share alike). Most authors choose between CC BY and CC BY-NC, and some journals also offer the ND variants; Creative Commons describes all six on its licence overview page. The definitions below come from the 4.0 versions, the ones funders such as cOAlition S and the Gates Foundation name.

One fact should shape when you decide: the licence you can have is fixed by the journal you submitted to. By the time the form asks you to pick one, a journal whose licence menu does not suit your funder costs you a resubmission to escape. Settle the question while you are still choosing where to submit.

CC BY: any reuse, as long as you are credited

CC BY lets anyone copy, redistribute, adapt and build on your article in any medium, for any purpose, including commercially. The reuser must credit the authors, keep the copyright and licence notices, link to the article where reasonably practicable, and indicate if they changed anything.

The licence also sets limits that many authors do not realise are there:

• Reusers may not suggest that you, or anyone else credited under the licence, endorse them or their use of the work.
• Patent and trademark rights are not licensed.
• Attribution is a condition, not a courtesy: a reuser who drops the credit is outside the licence, and your remedy is the one any rights holder has, starting with a request to the reuser or their publisher.

In practice, CC BY means a charity can translate and post your paper, a commercial database can include the full text, a textbook sold for profit can reproduce your figure, and a company can print and hand out copies, all with attribution and none of it requiring your permission. That openness is deliberate. The Budapest Open Access Initiative's 2012 recommendations named CC BY, or an equivalent, as the optimal licence for scholarly work. The worry that CC BY hands work away carelessly is one of the open access myths we have covered before.

CC BY-NC: what non-commercial actually covers

CC BY-NC allows the same copying, sharing and adapting, but for non-commercial purposes only. The licence defines NonCommercial as "not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation." Three consequences are regularly misunderstood.

It turns on the use, not the user. The Creative Commons FAQ on the NonCommercial clause says a non-profit can still breach the term, and a for-profit company does not necessarily breach it. Whether a use is commercial, in Creative Commons' own words, depends on the specifics of the situation and the intentions of the user, and Creative Commons does not advise on individual cases. NC therefore gives you a question to answer case by case, not a line drawn in advance.

It does not control ideas, citation or exceptions. The licence covers your expression, not your findings. NC does not stop anyone reading the paper, citing it or acting on its results, and it does not limit uses allowed by copyright exceptions such as quotation, fair dealing or fair use.

Commercial users can still ask. A commercial reuse needs separate permission from whoever holds the rights, which may not be you.

The cost of NC is uncertainty. Where reusers cannot tell whether their use is commercial, Creative Commons advises them to contact the rights holder or look for an alternative work that permits the use. Two concrete consequences: Wikimedia Commons does not accept files licensed only for non-commercial use, and PubMed Central groups CC BY-NC articles in the "non-commercial use only" part of its open access dataset for text mining.

Where the ND licences fit

ND means NoDerivatives. CC BY-ND lets reusers copy and distribute your article, including commercially, but only in unadapted form. CC BY-NC-ND adds the non-commercial restriction, so it allows the least reuse of the six licences.

Some authors choose ND in the belief that it protects their work from distortion or plagiarism. Creative Commons has argued this is misguided for academic articles, because ND blocks the reuse research depends on: neither a translation nor an adapted figure can be shared. The 4.0 ND licences do permit text and data mining, but not sharing the adaptations it produces. Meanwhile the protections authors want are already in CC BY: credit, a record of changes, and no implied endorsement.

The decision rule is short. Do not choose ND on your own initiative. Use it when your funder has approved it for a stated reason.

The four licences side by side

All four require credit to the authors.

What funders require

Check the funder before the journal, because the funder's rule usually settles the question.

• cOAlition S funders. The Plan S implementation guidance requires CC BY 4.0 by default, accepts CC BY-SA 4.0 and CC0 as secondary alternatives, and lets members approve CC BY-ND for individual articles when the grantee explicitly requests and justifies it. CC BY-NC is not on that list.
• UKRI. Requires CC BY on the open access version of research articles, with CC BY-ND available by exception.
• Wellcome. A cOAlition S member, and the one most medical authors meet first. It requires a version of the article, either the version of record or the author accepted manuscript, to be available in Europe PMC under CC BY at publication, and allows CC BY-ND only by exception.
• Gates Foundation. Requires CC BY 4.0 or an equivalent licence that permits reuse for any purpose, including commercial.
• NIH. The public access policy works differently: it requires the author accepted manuscript to be deposited in PubMed Central without embargo from the publication date, and names no Creative Commons licence for the article. NIH funding alone therefore leaves the licence choice open, which surprises authors who assume a federal mandate implies CC BY.

If a journal you want offers only a non-commercial licence, a cOAlition S grantee may still have a route. Under the coalition's rights retention strategy, grantees typically include a statement in the submission that applies CC BY to the author accepted manuscript, so that version can be deposited in a repository at publication. Check your funder's exact wording and the journal's position before relying on it. The difference between those two versions is explained in our guide to article versions.

For any other funder, search the grant conditions for both spellings, "licence" and "license". If one is named, that is your answer.

If none is named, check your employer before assuming the choice is yours. Many universities and hospital trusts run their own open access or rights retention policy that applies a licence to the accepted manuscript independently of any grant, so even an unfunded or industry-funded paper can carry a licence obligation. Your library or research office will know which applies to your department.

Details that matter in medical papers

Figures you did not create. A Creative Commons licence can only cover material you have the right to license, and Creative Commons advises licensors to mark anything not covered. Label reproduced figures with their source and terms, and confirm your permission covers publication in an openly licensed article.

Patient images and case details. A Creative Commons licence does not affect third parties' privacy rights and cannot replace consent. Follow the journal's consent policy, and make sure the patient's consent covers publication in an article that will be freely available and reusable.

Who actually holds the rights. Authors often assume they can grant permission for a commercial reuse under CC BY-NC, then find the publishing agreement transferred copyright to the journal. Read the agreement and note who a company would have to write to. If you keep copyright, decide who on the author team answers those requests; if the publisher holds it, you have no say in what it licenses.

Co-authors and multiple funders. The licence is one choice for the whole paper, so the strictest applicable funder condition governs it: a paper with one cOAlition S grant and one unrestricted funder is a CC BY paper. Raise it while drafting, because a co-author who objects to commercial reuse after acceptance has no route to a different answer.

A decision rule for your next paper

1. Read every funder's licence requirement, including each co-author's. If one names CC BY, that settles it.
2. Check what the journal offers before you submit. If it cannot offer a licence your funder accepts and no rights retention route applies, choose another journal. Our guide to choosing the right journal covers the rest.
3. If the choice is free, start from CC BY. Move to CC BY-NC only if you can name a commercial reuse you want to control, accepting that legitimate reuse will be lost too.
4. Leave ND for approved exceptions.
5. Check the licence statement on the proofs. That line is what readers and funders will see.

If you want to change the licence later

The direction of travel is one-way. Tightening up later does not work: switching the journal page from CC BY to CC BY-NC would leave every copy already in circulation under CC BY, because a reuser who received the article keeps the terms they got it under.

Loosening can still be rescued, because a rights holder is always free to grant permissions beyond the licence. If you hold copyright, you can give a specific reuser written permission without changing the published licence at all. Changing the statement on the version of record is a separate matter, decided by the journal and whoever holds copyright under your agreement. If a funder compliance problem surfaces after publication, write to the journal and the funder with the DOI and grant number: a repository deposit under the required licence often resolves it without touching the published article.

Every journal should state its licence and author rights before you submit. Directive Publications sets out its open access, licensing and copyright policies on its for authors page, where articles are published under CC BY 4.0 with authors retaining copyright. When your licence and funder requirements line up, you can submit your manuscript.