Scholarly publishing of papers or software

Licenses make it easy for creators/authors to grant rights of use and provide clarity for anyone who wants to use copyrighted works. They are essential for open science and promote the legally secure dissemination and re-use of research results. Licensed content is science-friendly: increased visibility, dissemination, and reuse.

This flyer explains what Open Access is, what Creative Commons licenses and the BSD-3-C license are, how to choose the correct license for your research, and how to cite correctly.

CC licenses are internationally acknowledged and are a standardized way to allow the creator to retain copyright whilst allowing others to copy, distribute, and make use of their work.

Hybrid journals, where you can choose whether your paper will be published Open Access or not, might offer you to actively choose a CC license during the publication process. Ideally, choose CC BY. The hybrid journals include, among others: AGU journals (e.g. Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Geophysical Research) and AMS journals (e.g. Journal of Climate).
Attention! For an AMS publication, you have to explicitly request a Creative Commons license after your paper has been accepted.

Writing software is a creative act generating intellectual property rights you own. Your working contract says you transfer most of these rights to MPI-M. If you share your software as “open source”, this is in contradiction to your working contract. To resolve this conflict, sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which arranges for a sharing of the rights to use the software. The CLA obliges you to add the BSD-3-C license to your software. This license allows all kinds of uses to the licensee as long as the BSD license is replicated in the code. Now it is “Open Source” and, as such, comparable to “Open Access”. The MPI-M Software Policy provides more details.

The CLA and the Software Policy, including the BSD-3-C license, can be found on MPI-M’s webpage: Good Scientific Practice.

Open Access doesnʼt always mean that you can freely use material or that others can use your material. When using material by others, such as figures or photos, check whether it is under a CC license and give appropriate credit. See examples below.