From a legal perspective, one of the most significant responses to the technological advances that have revolutionized the creation and distribution of copyright materials during the last decade has been the development of new systems for licensing (or authorising) others to obtain access to and make use of the protected material. These new forms of licences – usually referred to as “open content” – are founded upon an acknowledgement of the existence of copyright in materials embodying knowledge and information, but differ from licences commonly used before the advent of the digital era in key respects. As well as being relatively short, simple and easy to read, they are standardised, conceptually interoperable with other open content licences, machine (computer) enabled and have the advantage that, since they are automated and do not require negotiation, they eliminate (or at least minimise) transaction costs. Running with the copyright material to which they are attached (thereby avoiding the privity issue where rights are conferred contractually), open content licences identify materials that are available for reuse and grant permissive rights to users, thereby facilitating access and dissemination. ⁵
The most widely used of the open content licences are the Creative Commons licences.⁶ These licences attach to the copyright material and provide that anyone can reuse the material subject to giving attribution to the author of the material and subject to any of the optional conditions as selected by the licensor. The optional conditions are:

• non-commercial use;
• no derivative materials based on the licensed material are to be made; or
• share alike – others may distribute derivative materials based on the licensed material, but only under a licence identical to that covering the licensed material.

Creative Commons licences have more commonly been applied to publications than to research data. They have been particularly useful for academic authors depositing their publications in university or scholarly digital repositories or databases. Repositories help to make publications more accessible to the research and general communities. The advantage of a Creative Commons licence is that it tells people accessing the publication what they can and cannot do with the material, without the copyright owner having to deal with permissions on a case-by-case basis.

Below are two examples of scientific research publication projects that promote open access and reuse of material by utilising open content licensing models.