Copyright and Creative Commons Licence
One of the key aspects of the Open Access movement, was for academics to regain control over their published work to allow re-use of research without undue barriers. In the traditional model, publishers asked authors to sign a transfer of rights agreement. These agreements transferred your copyright to the publishers and meant that as an author, you could not do with your work as you wished. This enabled publishers to develop as commercial activity around academic publication in addition the subscription fees they charge for access.
If anyone wanted to use your work whether for research, or commercial usage, they should ask the publisher’s permission. For instance, If someone wanted to use a few of your graphs, diagrams or illustrations (provided they were not under third party copyright), the publisher could charge fees for the privilege.
What the Open Access movement aimed to do, in addition to opening up scholarly work for everyone to read, was to counter this commercial use of copyright, and more importantly to break the barrier to reuse. Indeed, not only is Open Access arguing for making scholarly publications accessible to all without charges it also aims to accelerate research by allowing reuse through advocating for Creative Commons licenses. By encouraging authors to apply a license themselves, the movement aims to give them back the control of their work and its reuse.
The advice is generally to add a Creative Commons license with attribution (CC BY) to your work. Applying this license means that the author must still be credited, but that third-party users can then reuse the work as they wish. While there are some more restrictive CC licenses, the CC BY license is the one that is often favoured by funders (See UKRI for instance). To help you choose which Creative Commons Licence to use for your work, you can use the licence chooser provided by the Creatice Commons organisation.
When signing contracts with your publishers, take the time to assess the agreement you are signing. It is often all in the small print that you will be able to figure out whether the agreement you are singing let's you be the owner of your work. As an academic author, it is worth asking, as prompted during OA week, whether the commercial usage of copyright serves your purposes and that of the community you are trying to serve.