Choosing a Licence
Open licenses are the legal foundation of Open Science. They determine how others may use, share, and build upon your work, whether it is a publication, dataset, or software. Choosing the right license makes your intentions clear: do you want your work simply to be cited and reused (e.g. CC BY), placed fully in the public domain (CC0), or made available only under specific conditions? For software, open source licenses (such as MIT, Apache, or GPL) play a similar role by defining how code can be used, modified, and redistributed. Without an explicit license, your work is automatically protected by copyright, which severely limits reuse, even if you intended to share it openly.
Today’s resource, choosealicence.com, helps you in choosing a license that fits both your work and your intentions. It offers clear explanations of the most common open licenses for software, along with practical guidance for selecting the one that best fits your goals. We invite you to try it out and to find a fitting Creative Commons or software license for your work! No matter whether you want to publish research data, documentation, or code: choosing an appropriate license helps to ensure openness and reusability.