Copyright & Creative Commons

Understanding rights & regulations

Using third-party material is a crucial part of teaching and creating meaningful and engaging learning materials. For instance, you might want to use photos in a lecture, share an article for your students to evaluate, or show a film to a seminar group. Understanding copyright will enable you to use third-party works fairly and avoid legal infringement without unnecessarily restricting students' access to this valuable learning material.

Creative Commons (CC) licences are a great way of making your work available to others whilst letting you set the parameters. You can apply conditions for re-use which others must comply with. You can add CC licences to your research and data outputs when making your scholarly publications open access. You will still be credited for any re-use, but open licenses allow your work to reach as wide an audience as possible.

This resource provides help and guidance for researchers and academics about using copyright material and applying licenses to your own work - you'll find more guidance in the links section. For help email copyright@abdn.ac.uk.

Related resources | MyAberdeen for Staff | Library | Academic Integrity

Last updated on 05 May 2026