Some of you may have noticed something different about the newest Nature Network blog “The Fourth Paradigm”: all the posts are made available under a Creative Commons license.

A Creative Commons Attribution license, to be precise, the most liberal copyright license in the suite, and the legal implementation of the Open Access declarations. The folks behind The Fourth Paradigm wanted to be sure the content was able to be not only read and disseminated widely, but shared, remixed and reused to the fullest extent.

That got us thinking here at Nature Network and we’re happy to announce that all Nature Network bloggers will now have a choice as to whether they’d like to make their content available under a CC license, as well

For those unfamiliar, Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation that provides tools and resources to enable better knowledge sharing in a way that’s easy to understand, legal and scalable. They offer a suite of six copyright licenses that you can choose from here at NN (as well as offering a number of other resources for scientific research and broader knowledge sharing). These range from the most liberal – CC-BY – to other variations that limit NonCommercial use, those that specify whether or not derivative works can be made, and even a ShareAlike provision – a viral concept made popular by the Free Software Community to ensure that all derivative works are relicensed under the same terms.

Each license comes with a human-readable deed, which details what you can and cannot do with the content. Accompanying that is also the legal text and machine-readable metadata (behind the scenes stuff you won’t have to worry about). For more information on the license offerings and how they interoperate with one another, see this FAQ (the green marking zones of interoperability)

If you have a blog on Nature Network and would like to add a Creative Commons license to your work, or if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. We’re happy to help.