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About Creative Commons Licenses

Step 1: Understand the License Types

The following describes each of the six main licenses offered when you choose to publish your work with a Creative Commons license. 

Creative Commons by Salah Mengerti is licenses CC BY 2.0

Step 2: Become Aware of Key License Considerations

Considerations for licensors and licensees - Creative Commons

The following list sets out some basic things that you should think about before you apply a Creative Commons license to your material, or use Creative Commons-licensed material. It is not an exhaustive list.

Considerations for licensors and licensees by Creative Commons is licensed CC BY

Step 3: Choose an Appropriate License for Your Work

Creative Commons Choose A Licence tool will help you make the right choice by guiding you through a number of options about the potential use of your work.   The short video below provides some more information about how to use the license generator to help you pick a license..

Creative Commons License Chooser Demo, by Sarah Moorhouse is licensed CC BY

Step 4: Add the License to Your Work

It is important to add your preferred Creative Commons (CC) license to your document. This will mean that anyone viewing your thesis document via a Google search will clearly see the license terms you have assigned and permitted uses. 

a) Manually:  

  • Insert a copy of the appropriate CC icon from: http://creativecommons.org/about/downloads
  • Add some text, e.g.: “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License”
  • Insert a hyperlink from your licensing text  to the appropriate license.

b) Using the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office (Word / Excel / PowerPoint):

See here: Marking your work with a CC license (by media type).