Content licences

You choose a licence per publication, in the Details tab of the editor. Choosing one on a publication does not change it on anything else you have published.

There is no default. If you do not pick a licence, the publication shows "Not specified", which means readers have no permission beyond what copyright law already gives them. If you want your work reused, say so explicitly.

Available licences

Licence	What readers may do
CC BY – Attribution	Share and adapt, including commercially, with credit to you
CC BY-SA – Attribution-ShareAlike	Same as CC BY, but adaptations must carry the same licence
CC BY-NC – Attribution-NonCommercial	Share and adapt with credit, non-commercial use only
CC BY-NC-SA	Non-commercial, with credit, adaptations same-licensed
CC0 – Public domain	Anything, with no obligation to credit
All rights reserved	Nothing beyond what copyright law already permits

Full text for each Creative Commons licence is at creativecommons.org.

Choosing one

CC BY-SA is the usual choice for teaching material: it keeps the work reusable by other educators while making sure improvements stay open.

Pick CC BY if you want maximum reuse and do not mind adaptations being relicensed. Pick CC0 if you want to waive your rights entirely.

A non-commercial clause is more restrictive than most people expect. It can stop a university from including your material in a paid course, and it makes your work incompatible with Wikipedia and most open textbook projects.

All rights reserved is a legitimate choice, but it means other authors cannot translate your work, quote it at length, or build a course around it without asking you first.

What you cannot license

The licence applies to work you have the right to license. You cannot put a permissive licence on material you do not own – figures copied from a textbook, someone else's problem set, or a paper whose copyright you have signed over to a publisher. See Acceptable use.

Attachments are covered by the licence of the publication they belong to.