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Open Source Guide

Licensing Basics

Understand permissions and responsibilities: choosing a license, attribution, and reuse-friendly practices.

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Permissions, attribution, and responsible reuse

Licensing Basics

A license tells other people what they may do with your work. Without one, your code, data, images, teaching materials, and documentation may be visible online but not legally reusable. Licensing is therefore one of the first practical steps in open scholarship: it protects authorship while making collaboration possible.

Why this matters

  • A clear license removes uncertainty for students, collaborators, funders, and external researchers who want to reuse or adapt your work.
  • Attribution requirements preserve academic credit and make it easier to trace scholarly influence.
  • Good licensing practice helps UCU projects avoid accidental copyright violations when reusing third-party material.

Choose a license before you share

Select a license as early as possible, preferably when creating a public repository or publishing a reusable teaching or research output. Different outputs may require different license families: software licenses for code, Creative Commons licenses for text and media, and data-oriented licenses or clear reuse statements for datasets.

  • Use permissive software licenses such as MIT, BSD, or Apache-2.0 when you want broad reuse with attribution.
  • Use copyleft licenses such as GPL when derivative software must remain open under similar terms.
  • Use Creative Commons licenses for documents, slides, images, and learning resources; avoid applying them to software code.
  • Do not publish third-party images, journal PDFs, proprietary datasets, or licensed database content unless the reuse terms clearly allow it.

Match openness with responsibility

Open source does not mean every file should be public. Ethical, legal, institutional, and privacy requirements still apply. Sensitive research data, identifiable participant information, examination content, unpublished manuscripts, and confidential institutional records require careful restriction or anonymisation.

  • Separate public reusable materials from private working files.
  • Document what is excluded and why, especially for datasets that cannot be shared openly.
  • Use sample, synthetic, redacted, or aggregate data when the real dataset cannot be released.
  • Check funder, publisher, supervisor, and institutional requirements before public release.

Credit what you reuse

Attribution is a scholarly habit as much as a legal requirement. Reused code snippets, templates, icons, datasets, documentation patterns, and teaching resources should be credited in a README, CITATION file, acknowledgements section, or project documentation.

  • Record source title, creator, link, license, and any changes made.
  • Keep attribution close to the reused material when possible.
  • Respect license compatibility when combining materials from different sources.
  • When in doubt, ask the rights holder or choose a different resource with clearer terms.

Practical checklist

  • ✓Add a `LICENSE` file to every public repository.
  • ✓State the license for code, documentation, data, and media separately when they differ.
  • ✓Add attribution for borrowed assets, templates, datasets, or code.
  • ✓Remove restricted, private, or unclear third-party materials before publishing.
  • ✓Explain how others should cite the project.

Next steps

  • Draft a license note in your README.
  • Ask the library or supervisor to review unclear reuse permissions.
  • Create a small attribution table for third-party resources used in your project.