Open Access does not violate copyright, the publication of articles in this form is legal.

The holders of rights of the research results are the authors or their institutions.  The holders of rights are often asked by publishers to transfer these rights to the publisher; therefore, the publisher determines the conditions for granting Open Access. The OpenAIRE initiative encourages researchers to choose publishers that allow them to retain copyright. Ideally, publishers apply an open license to works so that access and re-use rights are clearly defined for all end users. Creative Commons (such as CC BY 4.0 for publications and CC0 for data) or GNU (for software and code) licenses are best suited for this purpose.

Copyright and use rights for Open Access publications are expressed and licensed under Creative Commons (CC) licenses. Each publisher specifies which licenses to choose from when it comes to choosing an Open Access appearance. We recommend the License Selection page to select the best license.

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