Most open access books are shared under Creative Commons (CC) licenses.
CC licenses provide a standardized way to grant the public permission to share and reuse creative works under copyright law. There are six CC licenses, consisting of different combinations of four elements: Attribution (BY), Share Alike (SA), Non-Commercial (NC), No Derivatives (ND) (see this OA Book Toolkit post for the ins and outs of CC licenses specifically in relation to academic books.)
While CC BY is the most commonly recommended license for journal articles, more restrictive licenses, such as CC BY-NC, CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC-ND, are sometimes preferred by authors and publishers for academic books.
A frequent concern for book authors are derivatives, such as unauthorized translations. By sharing a book under a CC BY license, anyone can legally translate a book or produce any other type of derivative without obtaining permission from the copyright holder. Again, while this holds true for articles too, authors—especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities—tend to be more concerned by this type of reuse. This is why several cOAlitionS funders, including NWO, accept all types of CC licenses for books and not just CC BY, like they do for articles.
In addition, under a CC BY license it is possible for anyone to sell the book—not just the publisher—either in digital or printed form, e.g., via online e-commerce platforms. While this could potentially also happen to articles, in reality books are more susceptible to this due to their format and form of fruition. There are cases, for instance, in which an open access book licensed with a CC BY license is reprinted (via print on demand) and sold online by a third party which was not the publisher (see, for example, this blog post by Martin Paul Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London). In general, book publishers might see the CC BY-NC license, as well as CC-BY-ND AND CC-BY-NC-ND, as a way to protect book sales of the printed edition and therefore their investment.
In summary, while CC BY is largely considered the go-to license for articles, the recommendation might differ for books due to the specific characteristics and modes of fruition of long-form publications. Read more about CC licenses for academic authors.
Do you consider CC BY the go-to license for books? If not, which CC BY license do you recommend researchers use instead?
