Research After Graduation: Tips, Tricks, and Tools for your Post-Georgetown Life

Whenever you are using someone else's work, it is important to know what you are restricted from doing with it, but also what your rights to that work are. Georgetown has a guide to navigating some of the issues with figuring out your rights to use.

Images, in particular, can be tricky. Firstly, you may be able to use even copyrighted images without permission through the fair use doctrine in certain circumstances, such as teaching, scholarship, research, criticism, commentary and news reporting (as you can see in our page on the use of Georgetown library images). To really determine if your case is a fair use case, take a look at our fair use pages.

Creative Commons is a way to control the use of intellectual property without copyright restrictions. It is broadly used for open access and open source materials. Below are some of the different types of Creative Commons (CC) licenses you may encounter when searching for free and open resources. 

Public Domain		Used to indicate materials for which there are no known copyright restrictions.
CC0		Used to indicate materials in which an individual has actively licensed as having no rights reserved.
CC-BY		Used to indicate materials require an attribution to the author.
CC-BY-SA		Used to indicate materials require an attribution to the author and any shared and/or derived materials must use the same license
CC-BY-ND		Used to indicate materials require an attribution to the author and must be used as a whole with no modifications.
CC-BY-NC		Used to indicate materials require an attribution to the author and can not be used in commercial purposes.
CC-BY-NC-SA		Used to indicate materials require an attribution to the author, can not be used in commercial purposes, and any shared and/or derived materials must use the same license.
CC-BY-NC-ND		Used to indicate materials require an attribution to the author, can not be used in commercial purposes, and must be shared in whole with no modifications.