Research Licensing
All published research on Open Universitas carries a license. Authors choose at submission. These are the available options:
- Share freely — copy and redistribute in any medium or format
- Adapt freely — remix, transform, and build upon the work
- Commercial use permitted with attribution
- Attribution required — credit the original author
- No additional restrictions — you can't apply terms that legally restrict others
- Share and adapt with attribution
- Non-commercial use only
- Academic citation and teaching use permitted
- Commercial redistribution requires separate licensing
- Institutional API resale not permitted without agreement
- Author retains full copyright
- Platform hosts and displays under your stated terms
- Must specify license in paper and at submission
- Minimum: allow read access for platform visitors
- Contact us if you need a non-standard arrangement
Ghost Pricing — The Philosophy
Individual researchers, students, and anyone accessing Open Universitas directly through the website pay nothing. Access is free. Always. That's not a promotional offer — it's the model.
Institutions that want programmatic API access, bulk data licensing for internal tools, or redistribution rights are a different case. They have infrastructure, budgets, and are extracting commercial value from the research. For those use cases, we charge. This lets the platform sustain itself without paywalling individual access or running ads.
In practice this means: if you're a grad student scraping papers for your thesis, you'll never hit a wall. If you're a company integrating our catalog into a paid product, you need an agreement.
Institutional & API Access
For universities, libraries, research organizations, and companies needing bulk or automated access:
- Full API access with higher rate limits
- Bulk metadata export (JSON/CSV)
- Institutional attribution in catalog
- Option to host mirror for your institution
- Priority support and submission review
- API integration rights for commercial products
- Redistribution licensing for applicable papers
- White-label options available
- SLA and uptime guarantees available
- Custom data export formats
Platform Code — MIT License
The Open Universitas platform itself — the frontend, backend PHP, database schema, and everything that makes it run — is released under the MIT License. Fork it, deploy it, modify it, use it commercially. Just keep the license notice.
Want to run your own Open Universitas instance? Go for it. We'd love to hear about it.
Questions About Licensing?
Not sure which license applies to your use case? Ask — we'll give you a straight answer.
licensing@openuniversitas.com