Licensing and copyright

We require that all templates, examples and articles published in the gallery have clear license information, but any license is permitted (at our discretion). The choice of license is entirely up to the contributor, but we recommend the following:

• Use the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license for articles and examples. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. They describe CC BY 4.0 as follows:

  This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

• Use the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL) for templates. The LaTeX project is the open source project that develops LaTeX itself. LaTeX and most of the contributed packages are licensed under the LPPL, so putting your work under the same license is the simplest approach.

Any licensing restrictions or conditions expressed in the template apply to the template source code itself (e.g., if you modify and distribute the .tex or .cls files). Generally, copyright does not extend to the layout, style, or formatting of the produced work (the PDF), and you are not required to acknowledge the template author in your text.

However, exceptions may exist if the template includes original, copyrightable elements (such as custom graphics, illustrations, university logos, or substantial boilerplate text) that you choose to leave in your final document. In those specific cases, the license of the template (such as an attribution requirement) may apply to your use of those specific visual or textual elements.

There are many licenses to choose from, and the relationships between them are complex, so we recommend keeping it simple and sticking to one of these two options.

If you find an example in our gallery that does not have clear license information, or which has contradictory license information, please let us know, and we will try to resolve the issue with the contributor.