//Sharing Imperial Brands Science: Creative Commons and Twitter

From articles to infographics, you can use and share content from the Imperial Brands website freely under a Creative Commons license. Plus, we’re now on Twitter too! Scientific Digital Communications Editor Arran Frood explains.

At Imperial Brands we’re as passionate about communicating our Next Generation Product (NGP) science as we are about the vast array of research we have underway. As former UK Government Chief Scientific Advisor Sir Mark Walpole said in 2013: “Science isn’t finished until its communicated”.

In making a meaningful contribution to tobacco harm reduction (THR), we take the openness and transparency of relaying our scientific work seriously. It’s why we relaunched the refreshed Imperial Brands Science website in 2020, and communicate a steady drumbeat of materials about everything from our latest NGP research to product standards, technological innovations and opinion pieces encompassing all areas of the THR conversation.

Creative Commons sits between full copyright protection and the widest Public Domain availability. Image: publicoutreach.org

We want to not only share these works with you, but allow you to share them too. To this end, we’ve marked our content on the Our Thoughts blog page as Creative Commons (CC BY-ND 4.0) so you can distribute it more freely.

Creative Commons is an established way to share materials at no charge without infringing copyright. It is used around the world by individual artists, photographers, writers, scientists and global brands from Wikipedia, YouTube and Public Library of Science (PLOS).

For instance, scroll to the bottom of our recent article State of the Science: Oral nicotine pouches and their growing harm reduction opportunity and you will see this notice and image:

You are free to share this content with credit to Imperial Brands under a Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) license.

Like many academic publications, this is the license Imperial Brands is using to share material. Image: Creative Commons

Creative Commons means visitors are welcome to share our content, unmodified, on their own websites and social channels! Or perhaps print it out and share hard copies around a team or learning group. The same goes for our infographics, videos, features, and images credited to Imperial Brands that appear on our Science website.

Please note there are a couple of friendly caveats:

• First, under the terms Creative Commons set up you have to link back to their site using the correct license. After all, it wouldn’t be very fair if they didn’t get their dues and credit.

• Second, you have to stick to the terms of the license. In our case, we insist that no modifications are made to the materials.

• Third, you must credit Imperial Brands as the source of the material, and link back to imperialbrandscience.com

These rules are rightly imposed by Creative Commons (not us) and are a way for publishers, academics and creatives to share material freely on a level playing field. They also help people use it responsibly, while everyone gets credit including the original founders. It’s only polite, and we hope you will follow the spirit and the letter of these requests when sharing ours – and any other material online from any author – it is free after all!

If you have any questions then first-up take a tour of the Creative Commons website. If your query relates more specifically to Imperial Brands Science content, you can contact us here.  And Creative Commons use only applies to pages on the IMB Science website where you see the notice. If in any doubt whether you can use our content, it’s best to ask.

Our IMB Science website content is for scientific purposes only, and for use by our stakeholders who have an interest in the science behind our potentially harm reduced Next Generation Products (NGPs). It is not our intention to advertise our brands on this site.

Imperial Brands Science gets Social

Click image to see Imperial Brands Science at https://twitter.com/IMBScience

While we have your attention, we also like to point you towards IMB Science’s dedicated Twitter account. It’s an exciting new channel where we’ll continue to amplify our science-focused digital content. The feed will include press releases about our recently published research, infographics  explaining the scientific substantiation underpinning our products, evidence dossiers, notices about online and real-world conferences we will be attending or hosting at… and much more.

Follow, like, retweet and comment on IMB Science’s Twitter here: https://twitter.com/IMBScience.

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You are free to share this content with credit to Imperial Brands under a Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) license.