Free Licenses and Creative Commons: A Powerful Tool for Open Access Publishing in Grey Literature

This project aimed to uncover open licenses and describe how they are used, focusing on Creative Commons free licenses, the most widely known worldwide. The Open Access movement has begun gaining greater acceptance, with numerous institutions either strongly encouraging and/or requiring their faculty, students, and staff to deposit their scholarly work in the institutional repository. Via a survey, international, national, subject, and institutional repositories have been selected, in order to determine if Creative Commons licenses are being used at these facilities and if so, how and in what way (i.e. which type of documents are being deposited?, what is the degree of usage? etc). The survey focusses on the different Creative Commons licenses available, and how these affect open access and copyright restrictions.