Creative Commons licence
Also called: CC licence, CC BY
A family of standard licences by which a rightsholder grants reuse rights in advance, on stated conditions.
The conditions combine: BY requires attribution, SA requires derivatives to carry the same licence, NC forbids commercial use, ND forbids derivatives. CC BY is the most permissive of the set and the one most open-access journals use; CC0 waives rights entirely.
A CC licence removes the need to ask permission but not the need to attribute. Record the licence alongside the citation when you reuse a figure — “Figure 2 from Rivera & Chen (2021), CC BY 4.0” is the usual form.
See also
CopyrightThe legal right controlling copying and reuse of a creative work, which is separate from the academic duty to cite.Fair use / fair dealingThe legal doctrine allowing limited reuse of copyrighted material without permission, for purposes such as criticism, comment, teaching, and research.Open accessResearch literature that is free to read online, and usually free to reuse under an open licence.AttributionNaming the source of a specific idea, phrase, method, or dataset so a reader knows what is yours and what is borrowed.