Open licensing can play an important role in making agricultural research easier to share, reuse and build upon. But choosing a licence is not simply a matter of selecting a Creative Commons symbol. It requires understanding what can be reused, who holds the rights and what responsibilities come with that reuse.

These issues were at the centre of the recent FAO AGRIS webinar “Creative Commons for Agricultural Research — Licensing, Reuse and Good Practices”, which brought together experts Ilkay Holt and Revekka Kefalea to discuss practical approaches to copyright, licensing and open research. The session was particularly relevant for researchers, publishers, librarians, repository managers and FAO AGRIS data providers. 

One of the key messages was the importance of choosing a licence according to the type of reuse an institution wants to enable. Creative Commons licences combine different conditions, including attribution, restrictions on commercial use, restrictions on adaptations and requirements to share adaptations under the same terms. Understanding these elements makes it easier for publishers and researchers to select a licence that matches their intended use. 

For agricultural journals, for example, the speakers highlighted three useful questions. What do we want others to be able to do with the content? Who actually owns the copyright and has the authority to licence it? And what other contractual or institutional requirements apply? Publishing a research article does not automatically mean that all rights can be opened or licensed by the publisher. 

The discussion also highlighted an important distinction for FAO AGRIS. AGRIS is a bibliographic database that indexes metadata describing publications, while the full text generally remains on the data provider’s own platform. This means that the licence applying to a publication should not be confused with the rights and licensing of the bibliographic metadata used for discovery. 

The emergence of artificial intelligence adds another layer to these questions. The speakers noted that Creative Commons licences are copyright tools and cannot address every issue involved in responsible research sharing. Privacy, research integrity, ethics, provenance and other responsibilities may require additional approaches. Creative Commons is also developing CC Signals, a framework intended to communicate preferences around AI training, although it remains under development.

Ultimately, the webinar highlighted a broader principle: open access and responsible use should move forward together. Clear licensing can help preserve opportunities to translate, adapt, analyse and combine agricultural knowledge, while ensuring that the rights and responsibilities surrounding its use remain visible. 

For a global research infrastructure such as FAO AGRIS, these practices help strengthen the responsible sharing and discovery of agricultural knowledge across institutions, countries and communities.