OSCR

Licences and availability statements

A paper's abstract and its code and data availability statements are the paper's own text. OSCR shows them in full only when the paper's licence allows anyone to reuse them; otherwise it says what they point to, from facts, and links to the paper.

The rule

The abstract and the availability statements are shown in full when the paper's licence is one of CC BY, CC0, CC BY-SA or CC BY-NC, in any version. Under any other licence — the "no derivatives" variants (CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND), a publisher's own licence, or none stated — they are not reproduced. This was decided by the operator on 27 September 2026, and applies to every paper the same way.

Under an open licence

The text is shown as the paper gives it, with the paper's licence named beside it ("Reproduced under the paper's licence"), and the paper cited above it. The kind of statement is said: code availability, data availability, or both.

Under any other licence

The page says, from facts the harvester extracted and not in the paper's words, what the statements point to — the datasets and repositories they cite — and whether they say that the code or the data are "available on request", and links to the paper, where the statements can be read. The sentences themselves stay in the registry's private database, as do the sentences that decided each link's verdict.

An abstract is searchable only under the same four licences, and even then the index keeps no copy of it: a search finds the paper by its abstract's words, and answers with its title, never an excerpt.

The authors' code

Code has licences of its own, decided by its authors, and its own rules here: a script's text is republished only when its repository's licence allows redistribution. Otherwise OSCR keeps no copy: the reader's browser fetches the file from its source, at the verified commit, and shows it once its fingerprint matches, or links to it there when its host does not let another site read it. See the code policy.

What the registry itself publishes

  • The catalogue's metadata, when released as open data: CC0-1.0.
  • Tracing maps deposited on Zenodo: CC0-1.0.
  • The registry's software: Apache-2.0 (its source).
  • The logo: the operator's work, used as the brand page says.