Copyright Licences and Contracts

Open access best practices include:

Publication agreement: prior to publication, after acceptance of the manuscript, the author has to sign a publishing agreement consistent with open access principles.

Copyright: the author retains copyright of the published work without an exclusive assignment of rights. The author grants the publisher a nonexclusive use license to distribute the work, and at the same time all users and readers are granted rights to reuse the work under the terms of Creative Commons licenses.

Open Access licensing: one of the most widely used Creative Commons licenses that allows broad freedom of use is the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). The CC-BY 4.0 license allows unlimited reuse of content to increase the dissemination and impact of the work, subject to proper attribution of authorship of the work. This license allows readers to share any part of the work in any medium and format, modify it for any purpose, including commercial, provided proper credit is given to the author, changes made to the work are indicated, and a link to the license URL is provided. Creative Commons licenses are modular user licenses that can combine the main permissions related to a published content and can easily be adapted to the communication and dissemination needs of research products.

The four main permissions are:

1. BY (Attribution): allows others to copy, distribute, display, and perform copies of the work and works derived from it as long as proper citation of authorship is acknowledged and indicated if changes have been made.
2. SA (Share-Alike): allows others to distribute works derived from the work only under a license that is identical (not more restrictive) or compatible with that granted with the original work.
3. NC (Non-Commercial): allows others to copy, distribute, display and perform copies of the work and derivative works from it or reworkings of it, only for non-commercial purposes.
4. ND (No Derivative Works): allows others to copy, distribute, display and perform only identical copies of the work; no derivative works or reworkings of it are allowed.

Combining the four basic (BY-SA-NC-ND) permissions results in six licenses to which is added the public domain license:CC0

CC0 1.0 Universal: The person who has associated a work with this act has dedicated the work to the public domain, relinquishing all of his or her worldwide rights to the work under copyright law, including all related and related rights, to the extent permitted by law. You can copy, modify, distribute and use the work, even for commercial purposes, without having to ask permission.

Transformative agreements, negotiated mainly between consortia, libraries, and publishers, are intended to facilitate a shift from contracts that require subscriptions to access content, to contracts in which publishers are remunerated for publishing in Open Access, without further payment. In a nutshell, costs for journal subscriptions are transformed into costs for publishing scholarly articles by authors belonging to the academic institution; thus authors will no longer be required to pay so-called Article Processing Charges (Apc).

In principle, these contracts cover so-called "hybrid journals" in which there are simultaneously open access articles and articles that are visible only upon payment of a subscription. The new agreements should facilitate the transition to Open Science and enable the conversion of journals from "hybrid" to "gold open access."

• The author retains the copyright without further cost to himself.
• The author always has the choice to publish in open access. The choice is made after receiving notice of acceptance of the article for publication.
• Transformative agreements are temporary.
• Transformative contracts must be transparent so as to assess whether the investment is beneficial.
• Transformative contracts aim to encourage cost containment for scholarly publications: the cost to publish in Open access in the transitional phase is in fact absorbed within the overall cost of the contract, eliminating the so-called double-dipping (cost of the contract for the subscription to which is added the payment of APC (article processing charges) for the publication in access of the single article.
• CRUI Care has signed some of these contracts on behalf of Italian universities.
• ESAC publishes a registry on the transformative agreements that have been made between publishers and consortia.