Decide which license to give your work

As an author you always retain the copyright when you publish at LiU E-press, and all publications are published with Open Access. However, we also recommend that you assign a license to your work. You can here find a general guide to Creative commons licenses and read about the licenses you can choose when publising at LiU E-press.

General guide to Creative Commons licenses

Licenses at LiU E-press

You choose a license by filling in the publication agreement that you send to us and by including the license you have chosen in the publication. For more information, check Creative Commons' guides:
Choose license
Marking of CC-licensed material

This is what it might look like on the back of the title page (copyright page):

Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY)


Is the most open license. If you assign this licence to your publication, anyone can spread it further and build on it even if they would make money from it. However, they always need to give you credit for your publication and refer to it. This license is today recommended by many research funders and has become the standard for Open Science.
Recommendation: We reccomend this license for most publications.
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Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial (CC BY-NC)


This was previously the standard license for publications by LiU E-press. The difference from CC BY is that it is not permitted to distribute the publication for commercial purposes. This may limit the possibility of e.g. dissiminating the publication on social platforms. But in anology to CC BY, you must always be credited for your publication.
Recommendation: You may choose this license if you don't wish that others should be able to use your images for commercial purposes without your acceptance.
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No license

You can also choose to not assign a license to your publication. We then publish it freely available online, but we say nothing about what anyone may or may not do with the publication. You retain the copyright (unless you have agreed on it with another party).
Recommendation: Choose this license if you want to decide on a case-by-case basis if others may distribute your publication and/or reuse your images. You can also choose this option if you have written your publication in collaboration with a company (e.g. as an industrial doctoral student). In such cases parts of you publication can be confidential and parts of the copyright may stay with the company. To add a license, the company need to agree, thus you can instead choose to skip the license.

Contact us atep@ep.liu.se if you have further questions.