Licenses

NOTE: the license policy was changed in 2022 to make license assignment more explicit and flexible. We now require the license to be explicitly chosen at submission time. Prior to this, new submissions were submitted under a CC BY license, but authors were allowed to specify a CC BY-NC license in a footnote on their PDF.

The Cryptology ePrint Archive requires a license in order to publish a paper. The granting of a license allows IACR to distribute your work, but does not require copyright assignment. Once this license is assigned, it cannot be changed. By submitting to the Cryptology ePrint Archive, the author must specify a license and certify that they have the right to grant that license.

There are several factors that may guide your choice of a license:

IACR accepts the following licenses:

Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons licenses are the most common. Creative Commons offers a license customizer, as well as more in-depth descriptions of the available licenses. We support a number of license types, which are listed above.

License Features

Attribution
The primary purpose of publishing is to receive attribution for your ideas, and for this reason most Creative Commons licenses incorporate this feature to require attribution.
Share-Alike
A share-alike license requires that any adaptations of your work be shared using the same license.
Non-Commercial
The NC feature requires that adaptations of your work can only be used for non-commercial purposes. Note that some commercial purposes may be to your benefit, if it makes your work more accessible for translation or format conversion (e.g., ebook). Search engines may index your work, but then fund their work with advertising.
No derivatives
The ND feature requires that no adaptations be made of your work. Like NC, imposing this restriction may inhibit further sharing of your work.

Other Licenses

If you do not wish to require attribution of your work, or if you work for the US Government, you may wish to place your work in the public domain. This is the purpose of the CC0 license listed above.

Further Resources

There are numerous other sources of information to guide selection of a license. We recommend arXiv.org's license help and ASAPbio's preprint licensing FAQ pages.

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