Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial condition: Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information Gregor Hagedorn1, Daniel Mietchen2, Robert A. Morris3, Donat Agosti4, Lyubomir Penev5, Walter G. Berendsohn6, Donald Hobern7 Corresponding author: Gregor Hagedorn (g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com <mailto:g.m.hagedorn@gmail.com>) Academic editor: V. Smith Received3 October 2011|Accepted22 November 2011|Published28 November 2011 (C) 2011 Gregor Hagedorn. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of theCreative Commons Attribution License <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/>, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. For reference, use of the paginated PDF or printed version of this article is recommended. Abstract The Creative Commons (CC) licenses are a suite of copyright-based licenses defining terms for the distribution and re-use of creative works. CC provides licenses for different use cases and includes open content licenses such as the Attribution license (CC BY, used by many Open Access scientific publishers) and the Attribution Share Alike license (CC BY-SA, used by Wikipedia, for example). However, the license suite also contains non-free and non-open licenses like those containing a "non-commercial" (NC) condition. Although many people identify "non-commercial" with "non-profit", detailed analysis reveals that significant differences exist and that the license may impose some unexpected re-use limitations on works thus licensed. After providing background information on the concepts of Creative Commons licenses in general, this contribution focuses on the NC condition, its advantages, disadvantages and appropriate scope. Specifically, it contributes material towards a risk analysis for potential re-users of NC-licensed works. http://www.pensoft.net/journals/zookeys/article/2189/creative-commons-licens...