Incentivizing Reuse
Licensing as Infrastructure for Open Science. Today, much of open science still treats reuse as optional or downstream. We are asking a simple question: what would it look like to treat reuse, and the permission to reuse, as core infrastructure for how science is shared?
As research becomes increasingly modular, shared as data, code, methods, figures, and software rather than only as papers, the right to reuse is not enough. Researchers need clear, interoperable signals, incentives, and tools that support confident reuse and remixing from the start.
The Incentivizing Reuse Working Group is led by Creative Commons (CC), whose long-standing leadership in open licensing and global reuse makes them an ideal steward of this work. CSF supports the initiative, because identify gaps, surface reuse-enabling practices, and co-develop resources that prepare the research ecosystem for a more dynamic, connected, and AI-ready future.
The working group is run by Dr. Monica Granados and Taylor Campbell from Creative Commons, who lead the sessions and guide the group’s exploration of reuse-first licensing and infrastructure.
Why It Matters
Reuse is where scientific value compounds, but today it is often harder than duplication. Clear, open licensing is essential for ensuring that modular research components can be responsibly reused, attributed, and integrated by both humans and machines.
By embedding object-level licensing and surfacing context such as provenance, execution status, and reuse signals, modular research components can carry both trust and permission together. This not only supports researchers in reusing work with confidence, it also enables AI systems to trace, assemble, and recommend trustworthy scientific components.
Goals of the group
Explore how licensing functions as both a technical and cultural enabler of reuse in modular science
Identify reuse pain points and real-world examples where licensing has reduced friction
Develop practical, CC BY public outputs that support reuse-first research practices
Incentivizing Reuse Working Group
A global group of roughly 20 researchers, publishers, librarians, infrastructure builders, funders, and open science organizers, united not by consensus but by momentum. They bring different roles and lived experiences to the shared work of reimagining peer review beyond the paper. The group kicks off their work on Feb 12, 2026.
Incentivizing Reuse: Beyond the Paper
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From Albums to Streams: How Modularity Changes Systems
COURTNEY BABOTT & ROWAN COCKETT
“Spotify for Science”
What if access was never the hard part? Drawing on the shift from albums to streaming, this essay argues that science needs structural change, not faster PDFs, to enable reuse, attribution, and machine-assisted discovery.
