Tutorial: Include CC license information in the Journal typesetting

We encourage all our partner journals to make sure that the license information included in the journal typesetting accurately reflects the information available on the website. This is particularly important for journals that publish their volumes in print, since readers may access the content without seeing the open access statement and licensing info available on the website.
Here are three simple steps to follow.

STEP 1. If your journal adopted a Creative Commons license only recently, please make sure to erase any references to old copyright statements that may still be present in the typeset. 

In particular, Creative Commons licenses stipulate that the author holds the copyright on their work, NOT the journal.  You should delete any statement that might be construed as an assignment of the copyright from the author to the journal. 

That means that any lines of the kind: “© 2020 Journal Title” should be removed from the volume too.

STEP 2. The journal should include a Copyright and Permissions statement consistent with the information displayed in the Open Access policy on the journal’s site. 

The statement should ideally appear in the volume’s front matter page, it should reference the specific Creative Commons license adopted and include a brief description of its terms (see example 1 below).

  • Sample statement for Journals using a CC BY license:
Copyright and PermissionsCopyright for articles published in [Journal Title] is retained by their authors under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Users are allowed to copy, distribute, and transmit the work in any medium or format provided that the original authors and source are credited. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org
  • Sample statement for Journals using a CC BY-NC-ND license: 
Copyright and PermissionsCopyright for articles published in [Journal Title] is retained by their authors under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Users are allowed to copy and distribute the work in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source. To view a copy of this license visit creativecommons.org 

Note: If your Journal uses a Creative Commons license other than the CC BY or the CC BY-NC-ND, you can look up the license terms on https://creativecommons.org/ to draft an appropriate statement. We recommend you to check with the library before printing the statement.

STEP 3. If possible, the license information should be referenced in each article’s title page as well. Depending on the type of license adopted, you can add a brief statement in the title page’s footer or header, following this format: 

© [publication year] [author(s) last name(s)] [license type and terms]

Here are some samples you can follow (see the images below):

  • Sample statement for Articles distributed under a CC BY license:
© [publication year] [author(s) last name(s)]. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits the user to copy, distribute, and transmit the work provided that the original authors and source are credited.   
  • Sample statement for Articles distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND license: 
© [publication year] [author(s) last name(s)]. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source.   

Note: If your Journal uses a Creative Commons license other than the CC BY or the CC BY-NC-ND, you can look up the license terms on https://creativecommons.org/ to draft an appropriate statement. We recommend you to check with the library before printing the statement.

That should be all! 

Feel free to reach out to publishing@library.columbia.edu if you have any questions or would like us to revise your license statement.

Example 1: Copyright and permissions statement in the volume’s front matter page (from JMETC)

Example 2: License information in the footer of the article’s title page (from SALT): 

Example 3: License information in the header of the article’s title page (from JMETC):