Applying a Creative Commons Licence to your Thesis

[Updated: 31 Mar 2026]

As part of the submission process for your thesis, the online submission form will offer you the option to apply a Creative Commons (CC) licence to your thesis. This page explains the basics of what CC licences are and how they work, and suggests some important considerations to help you decide whether applying a CC licence to your thesis is the right choice for you, and, if so, which specific CC licence to choose.

Overview: main points you need to know

  • Applying a CC licence to your thesis is NOT a requirement. It is an option you are free to choose or decline to establish the terms of use for your thesis.
  • To inform your decision about whether applying a CC licence to your thesis is the right choice for you, consider how and the extent to which you want to make your work available for others to re-use and share in the future.
  • If you do not choose to apply a CC licence, then “all rights reserved” will be the default terms of use for your thesis.
  • Applying a CC licence to your thesis does not transfer copyright. You retain the copyright to your thesis whether or not a CC licence is applied.
  • You are required to agree to a non-exclusive licence to make your thesis freely available online via Library and Archives Canada, which is also part of the online thesis submission form. This non-exclusive licence has no impact on your ability to apply a CC or other open licence to your thesis. 

 

What is a Creative Commons licence?

The copyright holder in a work has the right to establish the terms of use that will apply to that work once it is shared and/or published. As the author of your thesis, in most cases you will be the copyright owner and therefore you are able to set the terms of use that will apply to others who access your thesis.

The default terms of use for a copyright-protected work are generally “all rights reserved.” However, to reserve “all rights” (e.g., sharing, copying, publishing, etc.) could restrict sharing or re-use of your thesis, even in ways you might support and encourage, without your explicit permission.

An open licence can set a specific but more permissive set of terms that would allow for certain uses under the specified conditions without requiring additional permission from you as the copyright owner. The licence is “open” in the sense that these permitted uses would be available to anyone who observed the specified conditions of the licence.

Creative Commons has established a suite of open licences to address a range of such conditions. These licences are internationally recognized and enforceable, and they are regularly reviewed and updated. The current versions of the licences are designated as "4.0 International."

Watch this short video, Open Licensing for Research with Creative Commons, for an overview on how CC licences make it easy to share your work with clear permissions while retaining your rights in that work.

 

Would applying a Creative Commons licence to my thesis be a good choice for me?

An open licence applied to your thesis will make it easier for others to re-use and share your work, which could be a benefit to you and your academic career. However, applying this licence to your thesis is effectively making an agreement with the readers about re-use. Before you offer such an agreement to your readers, you must consider whether there are any agreements you have already made, or that you expect to make in the future, regarding the content of your thesis. These will generally be agreements with publishers.

For example, if you have already published or intend to separately publish a chapter of your thesis, this might present a complication regarding the terms of use you might apply to your thesis as a whole. If you have already entered into a publishing agreement that covers part of your thesis, then the terms of that prior agreement may prevent you from applying an open licence to your thesis, as any new agreement you make governing that same content (such as applying an open licence) would be subject to the terms of that prior agreement.

Similarly, if you are planning to separately publish part of your thesis, then having applied an open licence to your thesis might limit your publication options. The terms of the agreement you enter with the publisher will have to be subject to the terms of the open licence that you have already applied to your thesis.

Additionally, if your thesis includes third-party content that is used with permission, or portions of your thesis were co-authored, then those permissions to use that content in your thesis may not allow you to apply an open licence to your thesis.

It should be noted that the required non-exclusive licence to make your thesis freely available online via Library and Archives Canada has no impact on your ability to apply an open licence to your thesis or enter into an agreement with a publisher.

If you decide not to apply a CC licence to your thesis, then you should select “N/A (All Rights Reserved)” in the dropdown menu of the online thesis submission form.

Scenario 1

A few years into the future, a researcher who is writing a book wants to include some content from your thesis, which they found online in the institutional repository. The researcher would like to ask for permission to use the materials, but they are unable to find your contact information.

Without permission from the author (i.e., you), the researcher will likely not be able to include any of the content from your thesis in their book, even if you would have readily granted permission if you had been contacted.

This situation illustrates the value of applying a CC licence to your work. The user benefits because the licence lets them know exactly how they may use the work; and, you (the author) benefit because your work, properly attributed, will be discovered by more readers.

Scenario 2

You are not sure which CC licence you should apply to your thesis. Given that your thesis includes a chapter that has been published in a journal, how does this affect which licence you should choose?

If you have published, or intend to publish in the future, portions of your thesis, the best choice may be to elect not to apply a CC licence to your thesis. This is because the terms of use of your agreement with the publisher, or which a prospective publisher would normally apply, governing the content from your thesis will likely be more restrictive than the terms of any CC licence you might choose.

 

If I would like to apply a Creative Commons licence to my thesis, which one should I choose?

All CC licences require attribution, so that any re-use or sharing of your thesis under a CC licence would require that you receive appropriate credit. If this attribution is the only condition of use that you would like to require of users, then the CC BY licence might be an appropriate choice for you. Other CC licences will include additional conditions of use.

Which licence you choose depends on the terms of use you would like to apply to those interested in using your thesis. Note that once your work is made available under one set of conditions of use, it will be problematic to try to make the conditions of use more restrictive in the future.

The four conditions of the set of CC licences are: Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives and ShareAlike. Attribution is part of all of the six available licences, but the others may be added either individually or in combination (but note that NoDerivatives and ShareAlike are mutually inconsistent).

The descriptions of each of the four conditions are as follows:

  • Attribution (BY) — The user of your thesis must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests that you (the licensor) endorses them or their use.
  • NonCommercial (NC) — They may not use the material for commercial purposes.
  • NoDerivatives (ND) — If they remix, transform, or build upon the material, they may not distribute the modified material.
  • ShareAlike (SA) — If they remix, transform, or build upon the material, they must distribute their contributions under the same license as the original.

These four conditions can be combined in various combinations, leading to six different choices for a CC licence. Please review the detailed description, linked below, of any licence you are considering selecting.

The six available CC licences are the following (with links to the licence details):

 

What is CC0 (Public Domain Dedication)?

Creative Commons has also developed a tool through which authors can give up all their rights in their work and place it into the public domain. This tool is known as CC0 (aka CC Zero). This option would generally not be a practical choice for a graduate thesis, if you expect to be doing more scholarly work in the future and would benefit from ensuring this work is attributed to you.

What is the Public Domain Mark? This mark is applied to works that have been identified as being free of known copyright limitations. This differs from the CC0 public domain dedication, under which the author is giving up all rights in their work and thereby effectively placing their work into the public domain.


How do I add the CC licence to my thesis?

On the title page of your thesis, beneath the line with the © designation, indicate the licence you would like to apply with descriptive text such as “This thesis is licensed under a Creative Commons [LICENSE TYPE, e.g., Attribution-NonCommercial] 4.0 International License,” and include a link from the descriptive text to the appropriate licence (i.e., one of the six links provided above).

Though not a requirement, you may choose to accompany the CC licence text with the appropriate icon available at https://creativecommons.org/mission/downloads/.

 

Where can I go for additional information?

Consult the Faculty of Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies' Creative Commons License page to learn more.

If you have any questions or concerns about CC licences or applying an open licence to your thesis, please contact the Copyright Office at copyright@ualberta.ca.

Related Opening Up Copyright Instructional Module:
Open Licensing and Creative Commons