Creative Commons Licences
By using a Creative Commons licence creators can define, in what way others may use their works. The main idea of the Creative Commons licencing system is, that the work may be printed or digitally shared - if the creator's name is being mentioned and the work is being cited accordingly. In what way a work may be shared can be specified even further. In total there exist six Creative Commons licences to choose from:
- CC-BY: The work may be shared without any restrictions, as long as appropriate credit is being given.
- CC-BY-SA: The work may be shared without any restrictions, as long as appropriate credit is being given and the work is being shared alike i.e. under the same licence as the original work.
- CC-BY-NC: The work may be shared for non commercial purposes as long as appropriate credit is being given.
- CC-BY-NC-SA:The work may be shared for non commercial purposes as long as appropriate credit is being given and the work is being shared alike i.e. under the same licence as the original work.
- CC-BY-ND: The work may be shared in an unmodified way as long as appropriate credit is being given.
- CC-BY-NC-ND: The work may be shared in an unmodified way for non commercial purposes as long as appropriate credit is being given.
We generally recommend using a licence that is as open as possible (e.g. CC-BY or CC-BY-SA). This holds especially true for articles, working papers, book chapters etc. If in addition to the Open Access publication your work was published by a publisher, a licence that excludes the use for commercial purposes may be suitable (CC-BY-NC-ND).
Preprint, Postprint, Published Version: How do they differ?
During the publishing proccess it is common to distinguish several versions of a work. Some publishers may only allow secondary publication in a specific form:
- Preprint: Version that was submitted by the author before peer-review.
- Postprint: Peer-reviewed version that does not conform to the publisher's layout. As regards content the postprint is identical to the published version, however it lacks the final layout.
- Published version: Peer-reviewed version published by the publisher in the final layout (including publisher's logo, pagination etc.)
In case of a secondary publication we recommend to make the published version openly accessible.
Open Access in Switzerland
Unrestricted access to scientific publications (Open Access) is being required and promoted by several universities, research funders and scientific institutions in Switzerland and abroad. Swissuniversities, the Conference of Swiss Higher Education Institutions, on January 31st 2017 adopted a national Open Access Strategy. The strategy requires publicly funded research to be made openly accessibly by 2024. As such the strategy supports primary (gold road) or additional (green road) open access publishing, as well as hybrid publishing, which is based on read and publish contracts with publishers such as Springer, Elsevier and Wiley.
The Swiss National Science Foundation requires all publications that result from an SNSF project to be made publicly available. In this context primary or additional open access publishing as well as hybrid publishing is allowed, only the gold road is financially supported however.
Abroad similar requirements regarding Open Access are being established. The European Plan S for example is much more restrictive than the Swiss Open Access strategy: The aim of the Plan S is to achieve Open Access by 100% by 2020.
Innosuisse so far did not set any requirements regarding Open Access. However, if all project partners do agree, an Innosuisse-Project may be published in an openly accessible way.