Open access

Creative Commons and publishing Open Access is well-suited match. With the wide-spread use of the term Open Access many definitions of the term can be encountered. While some content is available free of charge and without login it can be disputable if such content is truly open access. While access to read is certainly access, open access often requires more than just that. Consider the well-used definition by the Budapest Open Access Initiative: 

 By “open access” to this [research] literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution and the only role for copyright in this domain should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Open Access typically also focuses on granting the user the ability to use academic work to more than just read and cite in their next paper. Granting others rights to build-upon your work will allow research to be used in a wider range and let others create work that may adapt your research to other constellation or to modify and update it after you have perhaps moved on to something else. 

Consider these types of use cases that go beyond reading your article:

• Translations can broaden your work to a broader audience
• Adaptions of graphs will let other tailor your work to be relevant for more people
• Creating a short version of your article will make it more suited for a newsletter or magazine. 

These are all examples of uses that will not be permitted if an article does not have an open access license. With the right license you can grant others these permissions. Se more about selecting the right license in the section called 'Creative Commons Licenses'

References:

Budapest Open Access Initiative. 15th Anniversary by Budapest Open Access Initiative, CC BY 4.0
6.1 Open Access to Scholarship by Creative Commons, , CC BY 4.0
Why Sharing Academic Publications Under "No Derivatives" License is Misguided by Birgitte Vézina, , CC BY 4.0

When you publish and select open access you will often be presented with the a choice of different open access licenses when your article is accepted. The choice is made on behalf of all authors since all authors own copyright to the article. However, it is the corresponding author who will make the selection of the license in practice. 

It is common that the journal will offer a selection of different licenses you can choose from. Some or all of them will mostly be Creative Commons Licenses. Sometimes journals offer their own open access license. You are free to select this but keep in mind that a publisher specific license is not standardized which means that the user will need to read the terms of that specific license before they can be sure that their intended use is permitted. 

In Denmark, you will be the copyright owner of the work you produce unless your contract states otherwise. You are  therefore exempt for any restrictions for use of the work you produce. This stops being true when you sign over your copyright when you publish. If you need to transfer copyright when you select your license, the restrictions you add to the license will also be true for you unless it is otherwise stated in your contract with the publisher. 

The license will determine what others can do with your article - and yourself if you are no longer the copyright owner. 

Not all work you create will be published in an academic journal. There is plenty of the work you produce that you and possible co-authors are free to share as you like. 

That means that you can apply a Creative Commons license to your slide presentation, your conference poster or teaching material produced by you just to name a few. Just make sure that you are the copyright owner and ask your co-authors if you have any before your add a CC License. Once you add a CC license to your work it cannot be retracted but you are free to delete your own public copy of the CC Licensed work and not republish it or republish your work with another license. It is allowed for others to keep a copy of your work with the previous license though. 

Creative Commons helps you to choose a license and fill out necessary information to generate a license. The license is available in different formats to make it easy to apply to different material. Visit the CC License Chooser here.

References:

4.1 Choosing and Applying a CC License by Creative Commons, CC BY 4.0