Creative Commons is a global organization that gives authors the tools to share their work with the world. There are six different types of creative commons licenses that provide some flexibility for authors to determine how they want their work to be used.
All of our licenses require that users provide attribution (BY) to the creator when the material is used and shared. Some licensors choose the BY license, which requires attribution to the creator as the only condition to reuse of the material. The other five licenses combine BY with one or more of three additional license elements: NonCommercial (NC), which prohibits commercial use of the material; NoDerivatives (ND), which prohibits the sharing of adaptations of the material; and ShareAlike (SA), which requires adaptations of the material be released under the same license.
The licenses are free of charge.
As authors negotiate and sign publishing agreements, they should read consider their copyright protections. Some areas to note: