Licensing spans areas of library work such as promoting open access, helping people navigate publication rights, advocating for open infrastructure, and the technological elements of research and learning.
When used well, open licences can underpin a lot of possibilities for finding, accessing, creating, and preserving scholarly work.
I’ve noticed however, that often people aren’t very confident in their knowledge of how open licence rights work. I think our (librarians and others) work in the realm of information literacy provides a useful approach to that problem. We need to improve understanding of information rights and restrictions in order to help people enculturate their own their practices with open scholarship.
Creative Commons conditions or rights
Creative Commons licences are generally well-known but not necessarily well-understood. These licences provide for four conditions (essentially rights), which can:
- ensure we know who authored a work
- require that permissions get passed along to others
- prevent the distribution of modifications to a work
- and allow distribution only in contexts that are not, for profit
These conditions appear simple but even people that are aware of them often misunderstand how to apply or use them. The skills to consider sometimes far-reaching licensing consequences can extend into professional careers and even outside academia.
I regularly teach a workshop on finding and making open scholarship with Creative Commons licenses. During one part of the class I pose hypothetical scenarios to the participants where I ask them to vote and then debate which licences would best suit each scenario, if at all.
I never see perfect agreement because when participants reflect on the motivations the people in each scenario have, they envision different ways that the licences could support those. There are a lot of grey areas.
I’d like to share four of these scenarios with a few of the potential questions that they raise. I’ll refer back to them shortly in relation to information literacy skills.
Scenarios
Here’s hypothetical scenario 1:
A journalism student is a budding political cartoonist and created a powerful image. She wants it to reach as many people as possible. Not just for the sake of the message, but gaining recognition could also support her future career.
This student might wonder: Who do I need to reach? How will they access it? Those questions of access can involve different media, different platforms, even technical capacities, which are directly supported by a system of rights that could smooth or prohibit distributing her work.
Hypothetical scenario 2:
Together, epidemiologists and researchers from a university, public health agency, and a pharmaceutical company completed new research on a deadly virus. They want experts anywhere in the world to learn about their findings in order to prevent the virus from spreading.
They might ask questions such as what is its potential impact? How do we ensure the information is affordable to everyone? Do commercial incentives help or hinder?
In this scenario, there is a clear ethical issue, where the researchers want to minimize the possibility of a terrible thing happening. Depending on legislation and policies where they’re based they probably have certain publishing responsibilities and we know that when there is work from the private sector, there’s going to be an important financial consideration. Licence rights define ways that those requirements can play out.
Hypothetical scenario 3:
An author wrote an experimental, electronic novel about an AI researcher that devises a spooky new technique for machine learning. He found some software code on the Internet that he would like to distribute with the novel to enhance the readers’ experience with it.
The author wants to make something innovative and use or modify other peoples’ code to do so. That’s a real benefit but it raises tricky issues about redistributing it, selling it, and even its longevity. Will people be able to access it for example, from a library, twenty, or more years down the line?
Hypothetical scenario 4:
A team of ecologists are ready to publish their research about the effects of clear-cutting on British Columbia’s Great Bear rainforest. Their dataset includes geospatial coordinates of sacred indigenous lands.
Sometimes we tend to think of making things open, as a good in and of itself. That may not always be so clear. How might a licence’s permissions relate to the First Nations principles of OCAP (ownership, control, access, and possession)? We need to be conscientious of what licence rights enable and we need to be judicious with their appropriate use.
Motivations and impacts
I intend those hypothetical scenarios to help show how in addition to a licence that helps us carry forward our motives, we need to consider its impact within the greater context.
When we think about the research lifecycle, from ideas, collaborations, searching for background, precursors, related works, to developing a project, reporting on results, and ensuring it is well-preserved for people to access, there is a whole information ecosystem affected by the rights of the licences we use.
The information literacy connection
Broadly speaking, information literacy refers to aptitudes or critical thinking skills and habits about assessing information. It includes the processes for creating new information and the contexts of the systems in which we encounter information.
An important pedagogical resource that we often use is the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education from the ACRL. The framework sets up six frames (or lenses/concepts) positioned for developing certain knowledge practices and dispositions in how people interact with information.
My aim here is not to explain these in any comprehensive way but I’d like to highlight some points or examples for how they could apply in the context of learning about open licences.
1. Authority Is Constructed and Contextual
As we consider both the information we’re given by a licence and how we want to make our own works available, we can reflect on what those permissions say about the authority of the work’s creator.
One context for authority might come up when considering the reputations of different journals. Someone might want to be associated with a journal due to its clout or reach in their discipline regardless of its open access status. In a different context, we know that papers published under open access licences tend to get cited more frequently, which contributes to the perceived authority of the article.
In the scenario of the budding political cartoonist, imagine she licenses her image in such a way that people easily access it and start spreading it through social media. Perhaps some modify it to include alt-text, extending its reach to people that cannot see the image. Perhaps it provokes some politicians to comment on it. This all creates a context for perceiving the artist’s authority.
A feature of many sorts of open licences is that they propagate permissions from one person to the next. I think that’s also a form of authority, invested through the licence, which the person who chooses it initially, gives to everyone else that uses it down the line. In the case of the Creative Commons licences, I’m referring to the “Share-alike” condition.
2. Information Creation as a Process
Many licences permit people to make derivatives of a work. That permission speaks to the need for considering techniques and forms of media that are involved in the processes of creating information. It’s good to have an awareness of how the underlying processes give rise to accessing a variation on a work.
For example, imagine an open educational resource that was created by a professor but adapted for a specific course’s needs at a different institution by someone else. In the political cartoonist scenario, imagine her social network modifying the image, meme-style with new meanings.
People receiving such information didn’t just get something as-is from one source. It’s more fully understood through the ways people changed it. To engage in those sorts of processes, we need to know how the licence conditions enable them.
3. Information has Value
There are different dimensions of value; from understanding attribution requirements and copyright, to a range of commercial concerns and how these affect people’s access to information.
It’s impossible to apply an open licence on something you make without engaging with our copyright system. That system gives us the legal capacity to apply the licences. In my experience, many people find this element obscure or confusing. Yet the issue of attribution is fundamental across open licences and many of them also have very particular specifications about commercial value.
In the scenario of the epidemiologists and the virus, do we think that a licence prohibiting commercial use will be most beneficial because it reduces barriers to access the information? Or, do we think that a licence allowing commercial use would be better because profit could incentivize companies to develop cures?
When someone applies an open licence to their work, they assert an intention for others to be able to access it. Licensors need to reflect on the value of freeing information in relation to the privileges for accessing it.
4. Research as Inquiry
This focuses on the type of questioning activity that people engage in. It addresses the iterative aspects of doing research. The more widely that information can be accessed, the more it can be questioned, and questioning provokes directions of research.
Understanding what’s needed for the sorts of investigation, debates, and collaborations that are part of the research process lends weight to an environment supported by open licences.
My scenario of the author wanting to distribute some code exemplifies a way that research as inquiry could come into the picture. Software code is information. When code is openly licensed, a person can examine it and learn from it.
A licence supporting that openness, that ability to poke around the source and derive something new, also supports iteration and interaction with people pursuing information.
A choice to prohibit access, curtails intellectual curiosity.
5. Scholarship as Conversation
We often end up with a few perspectives receiving undue exposure. This is in part because restrictive rights have been imposed by legacy publishing and distribution regimes. Yet, many different voices or perspectives contributing research make for richer discourse.
To illustrate a bit, I’d like to describe a scene from the documentary, Paywall: the Business of Scholarship, that made an impression on me. Brian Nosek, from the University of Virginia (and co-founder of the Center for Open Science) talked about an experience he had visiting the University of Belgrade. He described how he was talking to the students there and discovered that most of them were doing their theses on essentially the same subject matter. He asked why they all chose to work on aspects of the same thing and their response was that that was where they had access to the literature.
That scene calls attention to how constricted the scholarly conversation becomes when the rights make access to research unaffordable.
The scene also reveals how someone’s work can benefit from a licence that expands its potential reach. How, if we want to reach more people and include more voices around the world, we need to pay attention to the ways that restrictions or proprietary licenses privilege those who can pay.
6. Searching as Strategic Exploration
As people figure out the information they need, they have to make sense of which tools and techniques could deliver on their needs. A person’s search process changes when they know that a particular licence will let them alter a work for their own use, or sell it, or do something else with it. They can use licensing knowledge to take advantage of search tools’ features that guide them to the works provided with the appropriate rights.
OpenAlex.org is a tool available to everyone. It supports sophisticated search techniques, including author associations, institutional involvement, and has quite a focus on open access sources. Other tools like the Qwant.com image search, supports searching by licence permissions. Specialized tools like OpenVerse.org support finding a variety of content types available under open licences.
As a creator, it’s important to know how the licence you choose can be used to propagate rights information into these tools. Will people find your work in an expensive database? In purpose-driven search tools? What can you do to make it more findable in these tools?
Returning to the Great Bear Rainforest scenario, is it a good idea to indiscriminately distribute access to that data via search tools?
Beyond CC, other types of licences or conditions
The Creative Commons licences are most recognized. They are frequently offered through open access publishers, repositories, and other media. However, they are not the only licences to consider. Depending on a person’s goals, it could be worth considering other licences. Here are few examples.
Commons-based reciprocity (copyfair) licences, directly address a perspective in the value frame. Someone might choose these to support forms of mutual knowledge access and development across entities like coops (for example, the Peer Production Licence). There are various ethical licences such as the Nonviolent Public License designed to protect against forms of violence, coercion, and discrimination. At the Root, provides similar rights to a CC licence, except these are restricted to people using it in compliance with a set of ethical standards prohibiting discrimination, environmental harm, suppression of workers’ rights, and much more. The Hippocratic License argues that technology is not necessarily neutral and so aims to be a licence for open source software communities to ensure their work is used in alignment with human rights.
Other licences address a different range of issues and content. These include: The Contributor Covenant, which addresses the conduct for members to participate in a community. An abundance of free and open source software licences exist, which focus mostly on permitting and propagating rights for studying, using, changing, and sharing software code. Many variations and philosophical differences exist among these licences. Take for example, The Commons Clause. It is a bit of licensing text that you can add to an open source licence, which continues to enable much of the open source benefits but prohibits third parties from selling the software.
The Open Font Licence addresses usage elements or commercial activities of concern to typeface designers. Various data licences exist, such as those from the Open Data Commons, which distinguish between databases and their content. Regional licences such as The Nwulite Obodo Open Data licence is interesting in that it calls attention to how people in African nations ought to be able to take advantage of their own data and it enables licensors to designate different terms for sharing data with people from different parts of the world. The Québec government has its own open source software licensing and the government of Canada like other governments make data accessible under specific open government licences.
Depending on the aspects of the research or creative work that we engage in, there are a very big range of licences that we can adopt to help ensure our work is accessed, used, spread, and understood in the right contexts.
Information literacy is needed for open licences
I hope that I’ve been able to bring some attention to how information literacy supports understanding and using open licences. Working within open scholarship practices necessitates reflection on what a licence does. The rights granted through licences have real consequences for peoples’ information seeking, research, creation, sharing, and preservation practices.
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This article was originally presented as a talk at the 1st Canadian Conference on Open Science and Open Scholarship on 9 October 2025, at Concordia University in Montréal, QC, Canada. You may download the presentation slides (PDF) with some additional information and notes from Spectrum, Concordia’s institutional repository. They are also available (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17382085) with all of the other presentations and posters from this conference in the Zenodo repository.
Related resources or references mentioned:
Association of College and Research Libraries. “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” American Library Association, February 9, 2015. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework.
Brunelle, Zachary, Jonathan Mann, and Utopian Turtletop Productions. Paywall : The Business of Scholarship. Edited by Russell Stone. [Potsdam, New York]: Utopian Turtletop Productions, 2018. https://concordiauniversity.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1051042159.
Emery, Christina, Mithu Lucraft, Agata Morka, and Ros Pyne. The OA Effect: How Does Open Access Affect the Usage of Scholarly Books? White paper. Springer Nature, 2017. https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-cms/rest/v1/content/15176744/data/v3.
The First Nations Information Governance Centre / Le Centre de la Gouvernance de L’information des Premières. Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAPTM): The Path to First Nations Information Governance. The First Nations Information Governance Centre, 2014. https://fnigc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/OCAP-Brochure-2019.pdf.
Hovious, Amanda. “Toward a Socio-Contextual Understanding of Transliteracy.” Reference Services Review 46, no. 2 (2018): 178–88. https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-02-2018-0016.
Knievel, Jennifer E. “Instruction to Faculty and Graduate Students: A Tutorial to Teach Publication Strategies.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 8, no. 2 (2008): 175–86. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2008.0020.
Mackey, Thomas R., and Trudi E. Jacobson. “Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy.” College & Research Libraries 72, no. 1 (2011): 62–78. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl-76r1
Secker, Jane. “The Revised CILIP Definition of Information Literacy.” Journal of Information Literacy 12, no. 1 (2018): 156. https://doi.org/10.11645/12.1.2454.
SPARC Europe. “The Open Access Citation Advantage Service (OACA).” https://sparceurope.org/what-we-do/open-access/sparc-europe-open-access-resources/open-access-citation-advantage-service-oaca/