1. The default licence: CC BY 4.0
All articles published by Aperture Papers are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Under this licence, anyone is free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, including commercially.
...under the single condition that appropriate credit is given to the original authors, a link to the licence is provided, and any changes are indicated.
2. Why CC BY
CC BY 4.0 is the licence recommended by DOAJ, Plan S, and most major open-access funders. It maximises reuse — including for text and data mining, translation, teaching, and integration into other works — while preserving the attribution that protects authors' scholarly credit.
3. Third-party material
Where a figure, table, or excerpt is reused from a previously published source, the original copyright holder's permission and licence terms apply to that element. Authors must obtain and document such permissions before publication. Reused third-party material is labelled clearly in the published article.
4. Supplementary material
Supplementary materials published alongside an article are released under the same CC BY 4.0 licence, unless a specific item carries an alternative licence noted on the file itself.
5. Software and code
Where software or analysis code accompanies a publication, authors are encouraged to release it under a recognised open-source licence (such as MIT, Apache 2.0, or BSD-3-Clause), and to link it from the article and the Data Availability Statement.