Why we are changing our republication licence

Since GroundUp started in 2012, we have published the vast majority of our articles under a Creative Commons Licence.
From 1 April 2026, GroundUp will publish most of our articles under a new licence, which we are calling the GroundUp Republication Licence. For most of our regular reputable republishers, nothing changes; they will still be able to publish GroundUp content at no charge. But under the new licence terms our articles will only be available for republication with our explicitly granted permission. 

We have decided to change our licence for these reasons:

  1. GroundUp has grown immensely over the past 14 years. The aim of publishing under a Creative Commons Licence was to increase the number of people that read our articles. For a long time this made sense because we had comparatively little traffic to most publishers. That has changed though; GroundUp now typically gets over a million page views a month, sometimes  considerably more, and driving traffic to our website has become increasingly important to us.
  2. The world has changed. Partly because of the emergence of AI and the increasing sophistication of social media tools, it has become very easy to set up "news" sites that simply take content from other sites and republish them. Often these republication sites are low-quality, in which news is secondary and the primary aim is advertising or some other commercial scheme. We believe it demeans our work to be published in this way.
  3. It has been hard to measure traffic to our republishers. Our new licence addresses this.    

All content on our site currently published under a Creative Commons Licence will remain under that, or a more permissive, licence forever; we cannot restrict the terms an article was published under after the fact. 

If your organisation wishes to be given permission to publish, at no charge, under this licence, please email [email protected]. Generally we will grant such permission to any legitimate news publication that — if it is primarily aimed at a South African audience — is a member of the South African Press Council.