Which license should be chosen in arXiv for a paper to be published in IEEE TPDS? I would like to know what license needs to be chosen in arXiv for a paper that is to be sent to an IEEE journal, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS).

Arxiv licenses:


non-exclusive and irrevocable license to distribute the article.
Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0).
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0).


I read numerous pages like A, B, and C, but I didn't find my answer.
I am no lawyer and I have not read the complete legalese, but as far as I see, the first option (non-exclusive and irrevocable license to distribute the article) is the only possible valid one, as it is the most restrictive.

All the Creative Commons licenses would allow others to distribute a copy of your paper (with attribution and some possible restrictions, such as the non-commercial clause). However the IEEE policy allows only the following:


  
  Author’s personal website
  Author’s employer’s website
  arXiv.org
  Funder’s repository
  
  
  [...] The posted article must be removed from any other third-party servers.


So using a CC license would result in a conflict, as you cannot both allow others to distribute copies while at the same time guaranteeing to the IEEE that there will be no copies on other servers.

This does not guarantee that the first option is the right one, however since the IEEE explicitly allows arXiv.org and we have excluded all the others, they will probably not complain...