Page 206 - Building Digital Libraries

Access Management

BY-NC-ND

Creative Commons licenses are an excellent choice for many
repositories because:
• Creative Commons licenses are well-known and widely used
outside of the library community for dealing with elec-
tronic documents.
• A number of tools embed the Creative Commons license
directly into resources. For example, Microsoft and the
Creative Commons organization worked together to cre-
ate a plug-in specific to Microsoft Office that allows a user
to automatically sign created documents with a particu-
lar Creative Commons license variant. Likewise, Open
Office, and open-source productivity software, also pro-
vide a mechanism for automatically applying the Creative
Commons license to created documents.

It is important to be aware that all Creative Commons licenses assume that
the creator owns the copyright. It’s also important to be aware that these
licenses are useful only in situations where standardized messages that
don’t require access controls meet repository and author needs. As such,
the licenses are not appropriate for a wide variety of materials, including
those that:
• Have been submitted for publication and need embargoes
enforced
• Contain sensitive information that must be limited to par-
ticular user communities
• Consist primarily of data. The impact of Creative Commons
licenses can be unpredictable upon researchers who depend
on data from many sources. When data providers dictate
what research can be done, by whom, for what purposes,
and how they can be combined, the effect can be to impede
research.
• Are subject to terms that expire, such as releases that only
allow dissemination during particular periods of time

For situations when Creative Commons licenses are not appropriate, a
variety of other standard rights statements are available—including state-
ments developed expressly for specific types of resources. For example,
http://rightsstatements.org provides twelve different rights statements that
are specifically designed to communicate the copyright status of cultural
objects. These rights statements fall into three broad categories: those that
are subject to copyright; those that are not subject to copyright; and those
for which copyright is not clear. The Open Data Commons Public Domain

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