In order for research to become fully Open Access (OA), it must have an open licence. Open licences set the parameters for how research can be accessed by others and establish how it can be reused.

However, open licences do not solely dictate how research can be used. Authors also hold moral rights which protect their connection to their work and persist regardless of which open licence they choose.

In this article, we define an author’s moral rights and explore how they interact with Creative Commons licences, particularly CC BY.

What are an author’s moral rights?

Authors of a literary work, such as a research paper or book, hold two types of rights: economic rights and moral rights.

Economic rights are concerned with the financial implications of how a work can be shared, copied, or redistributed. On the other hand, moral rights protect an author’s reputation and personal connection to their work, regardless of what copyright licence they choose.

The important distinction here is that, unlike economic rights, moral rights cannot be transferred or assigned to another party. While a publisher may acquire economic rights over a work, the moral rights always remain with the original author.

The Berne Convention, a globally recognised treaty which governs copyright law, established that authors should retain “the right to claim authorship of the work” and also “to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action” which may damage the reputation of the author.

These can be understood as two essential yet distinct moral rights.

The right of attribution

Making sure the correct author is attributed has long been a concern for scholars. Scholars presenting papers to the Royal Society in the 17th century sought recognition from the Society by ensuring their work was attributed to them.

Today, accurate authorship is still essential for upholding scientific integrity, with guidelines by the IJCME acknowledging the importance of ensuring scholars are fairly credited for their work.

In the context of moral rights, the right of attribution maintains that only the author of a scholarly work should be seen as such. In many ways, this extends to include the right against false attribution, which stops authors being incorrectly credited on a work they didn’t create.

The right to integrity

The right of integrity more closely relates to how a scholar’s work may be reused and allows the author to object to others using the work in a way which is harmful to their reputation. However, authors cannot simply object to any form of reuse; it must be derogatory.

Geography matters

Despite the Berne Convention providing a globally accepted baseline for moral rights, the exact extent to which an author’s moral rights are protected depends on each country and their own copyright laws.

In civil law countries, such as Germany and France, moral rights are considered ‘inalienable’, making them strong and unwaivable. This is different to common law countries, such as the UK, whereby moral rights exist but they can be contractually waived. Further, the USA has an even narrower protection of moral rights for scholars since protection is limited to visual artists.

Open Access (OA) encourages the global circulation of research; therefore, this jurisdictional variation has big implications for scholars and the strength of their moral rights.

Why moral rights are important for OA

Moral rights are relevant because the more widely research circulates and is reused, which OA actively encourages, the more important it is that authors remain credited, and that their work is not misrepresented.

Amongst its other benefits, the increased visibility of OA research is a huge incentive for researchers to publish their work in an OA journal. However, for many authors, this incentive is futile if they are not properly cited as an author.

Equally, given that OA endeavours to maximise the reproducibility of research, an author’s right to integrity is an important safeguard for preventing the work being used in a manner which is unfair to the original author. A recent survey showed that 40% of scholars worry about “the lack of available recourse in the event of misuse or misrepresentation of their openly-licensed work.”

Creative Commons licences

Amongst the various open licences, Creative Commons licences are often held as the standard for OA publishing. They allow authors to clearly communicate how their work may be reused without needing individual permissions. There is a spectrum of different CC licences, with each holding unique implications to how your work can be shared.

They can vary across 4 key elements, which is indicated by what letters come after ‘CC’, with each outlining important conditions determining the conditions of access or reuse:

• Attribution – BY
• Non Commercial – NC
• No Derivatives – ND
• Share Alike – SA

CC licenses all grant “baseline rights” and revolve primarily around the CC BY license. The ‘BY’ refers to the need to give attribution to the creator: to include who it is by when it is used.

As the foundation for all CC licenses, CC BY allows users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, even for commercial use, so long as attribution is given to the creator.

Of all the CC licences, CC BY is the best license for Open Access and is recommended by global OA initiatives such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative and Plan S.

This contrasts with CC BY-NC-ND, which is the most restrictive.

In our blog article ‘Open Access Copyright and Creative Commons Licenses’, we explore copyright in Open Access work, helping you to understand the different Creative Commons licenses that are available.

CC BY and moral rights

With CC BY being the most effective licence for satisfying OA principles, it is worth exploring how this is directly related to an author’s moral rights.

Attribution

CC BY, like all other CC licences, has a mandatory requirement that the original author must always be credited. This persists regardless of whether the work is reused, translated, or just simply shared. In this sense, CC BY doesn’t undermine the right of attribution; it actively empowers it by mandating that authors are acknowledged.

Integrity

Understanding the relationship between CC BY and the right of integrity is not so straightforward. A key feature of CC BY licences is that other scholars are free to reuse a work without having to ask the author for permission each time they use it. This makes reuse easier, but it also means that authors cannot prevent others from using the work in ways they may not approve of.

However, CC licences themselves do not waive moral rights. This means that an author’s right to integrity depends on how strongly their country’s laws recognise it. If an author’s jurisdiction recognises the right of integrity, they can still object to derogatory adaptations of their work.

Furthermore, a condition of the CC BY licence states if an author objects to how their work has been adapted, they can require that their attribution is removed from the derivative version. This does not undo the adaptation, but it ensures the author is not associated with uses they find objectionable.

If authors should find themselves in a situation where they believe their work has been misused, especially in the case of misrepresented or altered data that may endanger the integrity of the scholarly record, MDPI encourages scholars to contact the journal with details of their complaint.

MDPI pioneers Open Access

Articles published in all of MDPI’s Open Access journals are licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license which reinforces the most fundamental of an author’s moral rights (right of attribution) while leaving the others legally intact.

All research may be reused and quoted provided that the original published version is cited, without the need to ask for permission. These conditions allow for maximum use and exposure of the work, while ensuring that the authors receive proper credit.

We are dedicated to giving you all the information you need to understand Open Access. Our article All You Need to Know About Open Access covers a range of topics.