3.0 Introduction
In the beginning of this millennium, three open access declarations namely Berlin, Budapest and Bethesda (BBB), have transformed the whole scholarly communications environment. The electronic journals had already arrived by then. But scholars still used to browse through print version of journals as a matter of habit. Electronic journals brought out the concept of open access journals, where people will get free access to published journal contents. However, copyright regime existing that time did not have adequate provisions to deal with open access to scholarly communications. Then the Creative Commons (CC) licenses got introduced in 2001 by a non-profit organization with the same name, that facilitate making open access knowledge resources globally accessible without the hassles of copyright restrictions. Open content licenses help researchers to make public funded research findings communicated through open access channels. There are two prominent open access channels available to researcher communities, namely Gold Open Access and Green Open Access. Gold open access channel usually caters to open access journals and open access contents in hybrid electronic journals. Green open access channel caters to institutional and disciplinary knowledge repositories. Scholarly authors are also made aware of author rights and some rights they can retain while signing a copyright transfer agreement or a license to publish agreement. In this Unit, various author rights, licenses and rights assessment tools are discussed in details to help the librarians in strengthening their efforts in enhancing researchers’ level of awareness.