Open Educational Resources: Copyright & Licenses

This image is from  https://blog.tcea.org/creative-commons/

ND (No Derivatives) disqualifies an item from being OER because it may not be modified or remixed.

Copyright holders determine how their works may be used. An easy way for them to permit others to use or modify their work is to attach a Creative Commons License, which pre-authorizes others to freely use a work in a number of different ways.  Every Open Educational Resource (OER) is also Open Access (OA), but not everything that is OA is OER.

Open Access material is available online via a link. When creating OER, include a link to an OA resource, but do not copy, modify or place the OA material into an OER because this would violate copyright---UNLESS---the OA material is published with a Creative Commons License, or is in the public domain. In every case, the material that is used must be cited.

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Read more about Creative Commons Licenses at https://creativecommons.org/

6 Creative Commons Licenses

Attribution (CC BY): This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA): This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND): This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC): This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA): This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND): This license is the most restrictive of the six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.