CC BY Licensing Shows Momentum

Today PLOS celebrates Creative Commons and its positive impact on the distribution of creative works of all media types, clearly demonstrated in its State of the Commons report for 2015. The report, released today, shows continued global Open Access adoption with more than one billion CC licenses now in use across 9 million websites—making it easier for anyone to use, reuse and remix content.

Since its inception PLOS has used Creative Commons licenses. A founding belief of PLOS is that scientific and medical publications must be fully and freely available for society to reap the maximum benefit of both private and public investment in research.

The Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) maximizes the potential for both economic and scholarly impact, protects the rights of authors while allowing others to build on their work and strengthens the long-standing tradition of appropriate attribution and credit for scholarship.

The great advantage of publishing in Open Access journals is the increase in exposure, reach and influence an article can have as interested readers, educators, policy makers and other researchers share, reuse, integrate and build upon that Open Access content without restriction.

Note: The reports details the number of articles published by PLOS. That total is through December 31, 2014.