The Commission has adopted a new standard licence which will make it even easier for citizens and businesses to access and reuse the information the institution makes publicly available online.

For instance, access will be facilitated to videos and photos uploaded on online platforms, studies published in peer-reviewed journals, data and visualisations on the EU open data portal or documents published on the Europa website.

Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, responsible for the Joint Research Centre, said: "We want to share our knowledge as openly and effectively as possible. This means that we need to reduce technological and legal barriers and put in place terms of reuse that are clear and easy to comply with. The new licence we have now adopted will help us achieve this. Experts at the Commission's Joint Research Centre have carefully considered the options to ensure the choice we have made is the best one."

Re-use of Commission documents has been permitted since 2006, including for commercial purposes.

These rules were designed to present as little hindrance as possible, normally only requiring that reusers acknowledge the original source.

The decision to adopt Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International as a new standard licence is the result of a comparative study, published today, which found them to be the most effective option for the Commission to make these rules work even better in practice.

They will come into effect gradually. The Commission also tries to ensure that licensing information will be available in all official EU languages.