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Redistribution & Licensing

OpenCite retrieves PDFs and markdown for you and reports what it found, but it does not enforce a redistribution policy. The publication-versus-reuse decision belongs to you, the caller. This page explains what OpenCite reports so you can make that decision deliberately.

What OpenCite reports

Open-access status

Paper.oa_status carries the OpenAlex Open Access status:

  • gold, hybrid, green, bronze, closed, diamond, or empty (unknown).
  • is_oa = True collapses all open categories together; oa_status distinguishes them.

Bronze is free-to-read, not openly licensed

A bronze paper can be read for free on the publisher site but is not released under an open license. Free to read does not mean free to redistribute.

Per-source license and version

PDFLocation.license and PDFLocation.version record, where the upstream API surfaces them:

  • the license string (cc-by, cc-by-nc, ...)
  • the version (publishedVersion, acceptedVersion, submittedVersion)

These are visible in opencite lookup --format json --verbose and in opencite search output.

The license sidecar

Every downloaded PDF gets a <pdf>.license.json sidecar written next to it, containing:

{
  "url": "...",
  "source": "...",
  "license": "cc-by",
  "version": "publishedVersion",
  "oa_status": "gold",
  "publisher_tdm": false,
  "doi": "10.1038/nature12345",
  "retrieved_at": "..."
}

A later "is this PDF safe to commit?" check can scan the sidecars without re-querying the original metadata.

Guidance for pipelines that publish artifacts

If your pipeline commits PDFs or markdown to a public repository, be deliberate about which sources you enable.

  • Publisher TDM tokens (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer) almost universally prohibit redistribution of the bytes they return.
  • The sidecar's publisher_tdm: true flag is a machine-readable signal that a downstream scanner can use to block such files from being published.

When in doubt, prefer gold/diamond/cc-by sources for anything you intend to redistribute, and treat bronze and publisher-TDM content as read-only.