Unit 5: Creating CC-licensed work

Introduction

‘Opens beautiful doors’ was produced by Visual Thinkery for TIDE project, part of the UK-Aid-funded SPHEIR programme (spheir.org.uk), and is licensed CC BY 2.0

Now that we can attribute a CC-licensed resource created by others, let’s take a closer look at applying a CC licence to our own work and to work that we create by adapting OER.

In Unit 4 we looked at where to find openly licensed resources and how to evaluate them. We also looked at what information we need to provide when we reference or attribute a CC-licensed resource. This unit takes a deeper look at choosing and applying CC licences to your own work, and reviews what you should consider to make your resource easy to find and reuse. Finally, we also look at adapting openly licensed resources and how to attribute resources we create that blend a range of OER together in different ways.

This unit has three sections:

• 5.1 Choosing and applying a CC licence
• 5.2 Things to consider after CC licensing
• 5.3 Adapting and Remixing CC-licensed work

There are also additional resources if you are interested in learning more about any of the topics covered in this unit.

5.1 Choosing and applying a CC licence

CC BY Licence Icon. Trademark: Creative Commons.

The act of applying a CC licence is easy, but there are several important considerations to think through before you do.

Introduction

What should creators consider before applying a CC licence or CC0 to their work? There are several options for creators who choose to share using CC licences. There are also many things to think about before applying any CC licence or CC0, including whether you have all the rights you need and if not, how you must indicate that to the public.

Before you decide that you want to apply a Creative Commons licence or CC0 to your creative work, there are some important things to consider:

Which Creative Commons licence should I use?

The six Creative Commons licences provide a range of options for creators who want to share their work with the public while still retaining copyright. The best way to decide which licence is appropriate for you is to think about why you want to share and how you hope others will use your work.

For example, here are a few questions to consider:

• Do you think people might make interesting new works out of your creation? Do you want to give people the ability to translate your writing into different languages, or otherwise customise it for their own needs? If so, you should choose a licence that allows your work to be adapted.
• Is it important to you that your images can be added to Wikipedia? If so, you should choose CC BY, BY-SA or CC0, because Wikipedia does not allow images licensed under any of the NonCommercial or NoDerivatives licences except in limited circumstances.
• Do you want to give away all your rights in your work so that it can be used by anyone in the world for any purpose? If so, you might want to think about using the public domain dedication tool, CC0.

If you need some help deciding which licence might be best for you, this adapted flowchart from CC Australia might be useful – but please note that the information it contains is not legal advice. Starting at the top of the chart, the chart asks a series of questions to help you determine which CC licence would work best for your needs.

This is an adapted version of the flowchart featured on Which Creative Commons licence is right for me by CC Australia. CC BY 3.0

How do I apply a CC licence to my work?

Once you’ve decided you want to use a CC licence and know which licence you want to use, applying it is simple. Technically, all you have to do is indicate which CC licence you are applying to your work. However, we strongly recommend including a link – or writing out the CC licence URL, if you are working offline – to the relevant CC licence deed. For example, if you wanted to use the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)licence, the link to include would be https://creativecommons.org/ licences/ by/ 4.0.

You can do this in the copyright notice for your work, on the footer of your website or at any other place that is suitable in light of the particular format and medium of your work. The important thing is to make it clear what the CC licence covers and locate the notice in a place that makes that clear to the public. See ‘Marking your work with a CC licence’ for more information.

Indicating which CC licence you choose can be as simple as this notice from the footer of BC Open Textbooks:

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence

If you are on a platform such as YouTube or Flickr, you should use the built-in tools to mark your work with the CC licence you choose. Remember that some platforms, like Flickr, will mark your work with a particular licence version (e.g. 2.0).

Look at the CC licence chooser, which has been designed to help you select the most appropriate licence for your work. After you select the boxes that indicate your preferences, the chooser generates the appropriate licence based on your selections. Remember, the licence chooser is not a registration page; it simply provides you with standardised HTML code, icons and licence statements.

For examples of CC licences applied to different creations, from videos to offline documents, you should visit a CC wiki on marking your work with a CC licence and explore Creative Commons’ licensing examples page.

Do you see the text and icon just above the code? That can also be copied and pasted onto your work to mark the work with a CC licence.

Like the licences, CC0 has its own chooser. If you want to dedicate your work to the public domain, you can go to https://creativecommons.org/ choose/ zero/ waiver. Complete the required fields, agree to the terms and then get the metadata to mark your work with CC0.

If you want to mark the work in a different way or need to use a different format (such as closing titles in a video), you can visit https://creativecommons.org/ about/ downloads/ and access downloadable versions of all of the CC icons.

Whatever method you use to mark your content, there are several important steps for proper CC licence marking. There are three cases in which you will mark CC-licensed works, which will be discussed in detail in the following sections:

• marking your own work
• indicating if your work is based on someone else’s work
• marking work created by others.

Marking your own work

The first case is marking your own work so that others can easily discover, reuse it and give you credit/attribution. The best practice for marking your work is to follow the TASL approach for your own portions of the content, and for the portions of the content created by others:

• T = Title
• A = Author (tell reusers who to give credit to)
• S = Source (give reusers a link to the resource)
• L = Licence (link to the CC licence deed)

When providing attribution, the goal is to mark the work with full TASL information. When you don’t have some of the TASL information about a work, do the best you can and include as much detail as possible in the marking statement.

Starting with version 4.0, the licences no longer require a reuser to include the title as part of the attribution statement. However, if the title is provided, then CC encourages you to include it when attributing the author.

For more examples of how to mark your own work in different contexts, spend some time looking through CC’s extensive marking page.

See below for an example of marking an image with TASL information. The following image is a good example of CC marking because TASL with all appropriate links is provided in the attribution statement.

Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco by tvol. CC BY 2.0

Indicating if your work is based on someone else’s work

The second case is indicating if your work is based on someone else’s work. If your work is a modification or derivative of another work, indicate this and provide attribution to the creator of the original work. You should also include a link to the work you modified and indicate what licence applies to that work.

For example, you might want to make a minor change to the picture above. In the instance below, the photo has been desaturated:

A good attribution for this modified version would be:

The attribution includes the title, author, source and licence for the original photo, and also indicates how the original photo has been modified.

For other instances where you have made minor changes to a resource, you could also use a statement such as the following:

Sometimes you may want to make more substantial changes to a resource. In these instances, you may have created a derivative work. Let’s look at this example, where a new work (called ‘90fied’) has been created, using the image above:

The attribution statement for this new work should include both TASL details for the new work, ‘90fied’ and details of the original photo ‘Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco’. A good attribution could be:

‘Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco’ is licensed CC BY 2.0. Once you begin to create derivative works, you need to pay attention to how you license your new creations. We will take a closer look at derivatives and what licences could be applied to the work ‘90fied’ in Section 5.3.

Marking work created by others

The third and final case is marking work created by others that you are incorporating into your own work. It is important to appropriately reference every resource that you incorporate into your own work. We’ll take a closer look at how to do this in Section 5.3.

You should always make it easy for others to know who created what parts of the work and under what terms they can use it. To do this, you should:

• identify the terms under which any given work, or part of a work, can be used
• provide information about works you used to create your new work or incorporated into your work.

Final remarks

When applying a CC licence to a work, you should:

• use the CC licence chooser to determine which CC licence best meets your needs (apply the licence code if possible, or copy/paste the text and links provided)
• (if you are using an online platform) use the built-in CC licence tools to mark your work with a CC licence
• mark your work and give proper attribution to others’ works using the TASL approach.

There is no single answer for which CC licence is the best. Before making your CC licence choice it is important to remember why you are sharing and what you hope others might do with your work.

5.2 Things to consider after CC licensing

“Reciprocity” was produced by Visual Thinkery for TIDE project, part of the UK-Aid-funded SPHEIR programme spheir.org.uk), and is licensed CC BY 2.0

Applying a CC licence alone is not enough to ensure your work is freely available for easy reuse and remix.

Introduction

What do we need to consider when we create a CC-licensed resource? This section of the course considers some questions we might have about using CC licences. We also consider the importance of making your OER accessible to others and visible.

Questions about open licences

Here’s some common questions about CC licences, and their answers. You can find more questions and answers about CC licences in the frequently asked questions section of the Creative Commons website.

Ensuring OER is accessible and visible

Let’s take a closer look at what you should consider to both make your work visible and accessible.

Final remarks

Sharing your content using Creative Commons licences is generous, but that alone isn’t enough to make it easy for others to reuse and adapt your work. Spend some time thinking from the perspective of someone who finds your shared content. How easy is it for them to download, reuse and/or revise it? Are there legal or technical obstacles that make it difficult for them to do the things that the CC licence is designed to allow?

Openness in education means more than just access or legal certainty over what you are can use, modify and share with your students. Open education means designing content and practices that ensure everyone can actively participate and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. As educators and students revise others’ OER and create and share new OER, accessibility should always be on your design checklist.

5.3 Adapting and remixing CC-licensed works

Photo credit: ‘Combination of chilies’ by City Foodsters. CC BY 2.0

Combining and adapting CC-licensed works is where things can get a little tricky. This lesson will give you the tools you need.

Introduction

The great promise of Creative Commons licensing is that it increases the pool of content from which we can draw to create new works. To take advantage of this potential, you have to understand when and how you can incorporate and adapt CC-licensed works. This requires careful attention to the particular CC licences that apply, as well as a working understanding of the legal concept of adaptations as a matter of copyright.

Being open enables educators to use the resource more effectively, which can lead to better learning and student outcomes. OER can be remixed and adapted, meaning that they can be updated, tailored and improved locally to fit the needs of students – for example, by:

• translating the OER into a local language
• adapting a biology open textbook to align it with local science standards
• modifying an OER simulation to make it accessible for a student who cannot hear.

The ideas of remix and adaptation are fundamental to education. Creative reuse of materials created by other educators and authors is about more than just seeking inspiration; we copy, adapt and combine different materials to craft education resources for our students.

Adapting OER

Copying a CC-licensed work and sharing it is straightforward. You must:

• make sure to provide attribution (TASL)
• refrain from using it for commercial purposes if it is licensed with one of the non-commercial (NC) licences.

If a CC licence permits – for example, if it does not contain the no-derivatives (ND) element – then you can also make changes to a resource and share it with others. In Section 5.1 we looked at doing this and how to acknowledge the changes, as well as introducing derivative works.

But incorporating materials created by others and combining materials from different sources can be tricky in terms of both pedagogy and copyright. What do we need to consider if we are changing a CC-licensed work or incorporating it into a new work?

First, remember that if your use of someone else’s CC-licensed work falls under an exception or limitation to copyright (such as fair use or fair dealing), then you have no obligations under the CC licence. If that is not the case, you need to rely on the CC licence for permission to adapt the work.

Adaptation or remix?

A remix is a type of adaptation that blends together a combination of resources from different sources to create a wholly new creation. As the resources have been combined together seamlessly, you often cannot tell where one openly licensed work ends and another begins. An example of a remix could be a new textbook that you create by combining several OER with your own material to create a new textbook. While this flexibility is useful for the new creator, it is still important to provide attribution to the individual parts that went into making the adaptation.

Image credit: ‘CC Smoothie‘ by Nate Angell. CC BY. Derivative of ‘Strawberry Smoothie On Glass Jar’ by Element5 (https://www.pexels.com/ photo/ strawberry-smoothie-on-glass-jar-775032/) in the public domain, and various Creative Commons licence icons by Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/ about/ downloads) used under CC BY.

A good way to illustrate how remix works is the analogy of a ‘smoothie’ drink. In the picture above, you can see that the smoothie drink (CC BY-NC-SA) has been created by blending together bananas (CC BY NC), strawberries (public domain), oranges (CC BY NC-SA) and pineapple (CC BY).

There are some important things to consider before we make the smoothie. First, in order to combine these fruits to make the smoothie, they need to have compatible licence types. This is why it is important to plan ahead when you want to combine different openly licensed resources together.

Second, it’s important to be aware of what licences work well together. The table below reviews what open licences are compatible with each other for remix purposes. The table includes CC0 and public domain. You can choose one licence type on the vertical and another licence type on the horizontal.

• The tick symbol (✔) means that that one licence type is compatible with another licence type. This is good news if you would like to create a remix using OER with these licences.
• A cross symbol (✘) means that the licences selected are incompatible for remixing. This means you cannot remix OER with these licence types.

Let’s look at an example. Say I would like to remix textbook content licensed CC BY-NC with online course content that is licensed CC BY-SA. Are these licence types compatible?

This table was reformatted as part of the OEPS course Becoming an open educator (Section 4.2, ‘Remixing OER’). The original table is from Frequently Asked Questions by Creative Commons and licensed CC BY 4.0 Red arrows and circles have been added here for illustrative purposes.

That’s correct! Unfortunately I would not be able to remix these OER. This is because if I use CC BY-SA licensed material in a remix, I cannot combine it with OER that additionally requires me to prohibit commercial use. To do so would be a violation of the requirements of the CC BY-SA licence.

However, you would not be able to combine CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA resources together. This is because you would be unable to abide by the requirement to license the resource both CC BY-SA and CC BY-NC-SA.

Let’s return to the example of our smoothie drink, which is licensed CC BY-NC-SA. Let’s look at the types of licences used in this combination. The smoothie drink has been created from banana (CC BY NC), strawberries (public domain), oranges (CC BY NC-SA) and pineapple (CC BY). The most restrictive licence used in this remix is the oranges (CC BY NC-SA). Use the chart above to review what licences CC BY NC-SA is compatible with.

Yes, that’s correct! You cannot combine CC BY NC-SA licensed resources with CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC-ND licensed resources. This is because two of these licence types contain the no-derivatives (ND) element (CC BY-ND and CC BY-NC-ND) and so cannot be adapted and shared with others. The remaining licence type CC BY-SA requires us to license any adapted versions of the material on the same licence type. Because the oranges already have a ‘SA’ requirement that is different to that of the CC BY-SA licence, we cannot combine these works. This means that if we wanted to use the oranges in our smoothie drink, only fruits in the Public Domain or licensed CC BY, CC BY-NC or CC BY-NC-SA could be combined.

As you can see, it’s very important to consider different licence types and to ensure that they are compatible before you start to combine them to make something new. As we’ve seen above, remix is easier if you are combining open resources which use more liberal licences, such as CC BY. Although you cannot include copyrighted material in your OER without permission, you can provide URLs to copyrighted material: for example, videos on YouTube that are not openly licensed.

How should I attribute adapted works?

In Unit 5.1 we saw the example of ‘90fied’, which had been created by adapting a photo that was originally licensed CC BY 2.0:

This section will take a closer look at what licences could be applied to both adaptations of individual OER (such as the ‘90fied’ image) and adaptations that blend together or remix a range of OER (such as the smoothie drink we saw earlier). What options do you have for licensing the copyright in your adaptations? The original licence(s) continue to govern reuse of the elements from the original work(s) that you used when creating your adaptation. Remember that your rights in your adaptation only apply to your own contributions.

Let’s look at the Adapters Licence Chart below. The left-hand column of the chart shows the status of the original work. When using the chart, you will select the licence applied to the resource you have adapted. In instances where you have combined more than one resource (as in the case of the smoothie, above) you will have already used the Remix Chart above to ensure that you are not trying to combine resources that are incompatible. This means you should review the most restrictive licence in the remix to check how you can license the new resource you have created.

The top row of the table shows the different options for licensing your adaptation. In the main body of the table there are three possible responses to whether the ‘status of the original work’ or licence on the OER you would like to remix is compatible with the licence you would like to apply to your new remix:

•  

  • A tick symbol (✔) means that the status of the original work is compatible with your chosen licence type – this is good news if you would like to apply this licence to your adaptation!
  • A cross symbol (✘) means that you cannot license your adaptation using that licence type. This is because your chosen licence type is not compatible with the licence that was originally applied to the OER.
  • There is a small number of examples where you could apply a particular licence to your adaptation, but it is not advisable. These options are described as ‘Not recommended but technically possible’.

Let’s look at the chart in more detail:

This table was reformatted as shown for the OEPS course Becoming an open educator (Section 4.2, ‘Remixing OER’). The original Adapter’s Licence Chart table is from Frequently Asked Questions by Creative Commons and licensed CC BY 4.0

You cannot change resources that include a NoDerivatives (ND) component in their licence. This means that if a resource is licensed CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC-ND, you cannot make changes to the resource and share it. This is why there are no licence options for these resources and a cross is shown for all possible adapter licence options.

For resources that include a ShareAlike (SA) component in the original licence, you must apply the same licence to your adapted resource. If the original resource was CC BY-SA, your new resource must also be licensed CC BY-SA. If the original resource was CC BY-NC-SA, you must also license your version of the resource CC BY-NC-SA. All SA licences after version 1.0 allow you to use a later version of the same licence on your adaptation.

The smoothie drink has been created from banana (CC BY NC), strawberries (public domain), oranges (CC BY NC-SA) and pineapple (CC BY). The most restrictive licence used in the remix is the oranges (CC BY NC-SA). As we saw in the last section, including oranges in our smoothie drink limits the different license types we can combine. In this instance, as we are including a resource with a ShareAlike (SA) license, this also determines the license that we can apply to the smoothie drink itself. The smoothie drink is therefore licensed CC BY NC-SA – the same license as the orange. This is because if you use material with a ShareAlike (SA) licence, you are required to apply that licence type to your remix.

There are also a small number of non-CC licences that have been designated as CC Compatible Licences for ShareAlike purposes. You can read more about that here.

There is a number of options for OER that you would like to adapt that are in the public domain or licensed CC BY or CC BY-NC.

What is in the public domain depends on the copyright law where you are. Public domain resources are no longer copyrighted. There are also resources marked with a CC0 licence, where creators have formally relinquished or given up their copyright before it expires. This means that the resource is now in the public domain.

With public domain or CC0 resources you also do not have to provide any information on the original creator (if available) when you reuse the resource. However, it is often useful to include this information (if available) with the URL so that other people can find the original. You can apply any CC licence to your new version of the CC0 or public domain resources.

There are a number of options for resources that are originally CC BY-NC and CC BY that are described as ‘not recommended but technically possible’. Why is this the case?

Applying a ‘not recommended but technically possible’ license to your remix or adaptation means you are not violating license requirements but you are potentially making it difficult for other users who want to use your resource. For example, if you changed a CC BY-NC licensed resource, applying a CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA or CC BY-NC-ND licence to your new creation would clearly retain the original ‘NC’ aspect of the licence in each instance, even though the ‘SA’ and ‘ND’ versions would be more restrictive than the original license. This is why all these options are marked with a tick on the table. However, if you were to license a CC BY-NC resource as CC BY, CC BY-ND or CC BY-SA, it would not be clear to other users that the original resource should not be used in commercial contexts as per the Non-Commercial (NC) element requirement. Hence these options are all described as ‘not recommended but technically possible’.

You therefore need to ensure you include information about the original licence so that other users are aware of the original licence conditions. As Creative Commons notes:

In the example of ‘90field’, the original image that this derivative is based on (Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco) is licensed CC BY. According to the Adapter’s License Chart, this means you could licence your new creation on any CC licence or dedicate it to the Public Domain by using the CC0 tool. However, it is not recommended to dedicate the work to the public domain, since there is no requirement to attribute this type of resource. This would mean that, as there is not requirement to attribute material in the Public Domain, it is likely that as the new creation was used and shared, information about the original resource (‘90fied’) would be lost.

As with any OER, you will need to acknowledge all resources appropriately and you should always provide attribution for all sources that were remixed. This can be done at the end of a chapter (if you are creating a textbook) or in a separate acknowledgements or sources list. We will look at some examples of these lists in the section on referencing below.

In the additional resources section you will find a range of resources on remixing, including more on attribution. You can also find the original Adapter’s Licence chart here.

Collections

Like a thali, a collection compiles different works together while keeping them organised as distinct separate objects. This means you are not blending OER together, as seen in the example of the smoothie, but keeping resources separate. This means that you can include NoDerivatives (ND) licensed resources and adapted material in a collection, because you are keeping each openly licensed resource separate. As we noted earlier, a collection is not an adaptation.

An example of a collection would be a book that compiles openly licensed essays from different sources together.

Attributions: ‘CC Thali‘ was created by Beck Pitt and is licensed CC BY 2.0. It is a derivative of ‘Thali‘ by SteveR- (https://www.flickr.com/ photos/ git/ 3936914188/) used under a CC BY 2.0, and various Creative Commons licence icons by Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/ about/ downloads) used under CC BY 4.0. Inspired by the ‘CC TV Dinner’ image by Nate Angell: http://xolotl.org/ open-licensing-over-tv-dinners-and-smoothies/

When you combine material into a collection, you may have a separate copyright of your own that you may license. However, your copyright only extends to the new contributions that you made to the work. In a collection, that is the selection and arrangement of the various works in the collection, and not the individual works themselves.

For example, you can select and arrange pre-existing poems published by others into an anthology, write an introduction, and design a cover for the collection, but your copyright and the only copyright you can license extends to your arrangement of the poems (not the poems themselves), as well as your original introduction and cover. The poems are not yours to license. You must also provide attribution and licensing information about the individual works in your collection. This gives the public the information they need to understand who created what and which license terms apply to specific content.

In the example of the thali above, there is a mix of differently licensed resources included in the collection: Public Domain, CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-SA and CC BY-NC-ND. What licence could we apply to this collection? Although we have included ND-licensed resources, it is important to note that these do not affect the overall licence of a collection. This is because in a collection, all resources remain discrete from each other. We might make changes to an individual resource that we include, but because it remains discrete, we will only acknowledge any changes we have made in relation to a specific piece of OER.

We also have both SA- and NC-licensed resources in the ‘thali’ collection. Because this is a collection rather than a remix, the SA restriction does not apply to how we license our collection – only to any adaptation we make of an individual, discrete resource.

However, if you incorporate non-commercial (NC) licensed material into a collection (as in the instance of the thali above), you cannot use the collection commercially and should make it clear to others that the collection should not be used commercially. This could be done in a number of different ways. For example, you could apply a Non-Commercial (NC) license to the collection. This would then clearly indicate to potential users that the collection should not be used commercially.

Alternatively, you might apply another license (e.g. CC BY) to your collection but clearly indicate that the collection contains Non-Commercial (NC) licensed resources. This could take the form of an addition to the attribution statement and disclaimer. Including this information upfront would make it very clear to users that your collection included material that could only be used in non-commercial contexts.

Let’s now take a closer look at how you should reference these types of resources.

Referencing

When you create a collection or remix OER, you must provide attribution for the individual works that you have used. This gives users of your OER the information they need to understand who created what and which licence terms apply to specific content. Your attributions should include the Title, Author, Source and Licence (TASL) for each of the OER you use.

As mentioned earlier, you can use an acknowledgements or sources section to organise this information. Using a disclaimer on the overall work also helps a user to understand what licence type has been applied to the overall work, but that there are exceptions. Let’s take a look at the different ways we can acknowledge OER use and when each is most appropriate.

Attributing a collection

Here are some examples of how you could attribute a collection. For example, you could have created a presentation or website that comprises your original content and openly licensed images. You could attribute each image on the relevant slide or where they are used online. Alternatively, depending on the resource, you could have the individual attributions listed on a separate slide of a presentation or on a separate page of a course.

In an appropriate place on the resource – such as the cover of a presentation or on the footer of a website – you could use one of the following statements, which would include a URL to the licence you are applying to your collection:

• [Name of resource] by [creator] is licensed [licence type], unless otherwise stated.
• Unless otherwise noted, [name of resource] by [creator] is licensed [licence type].
• This work was created by [creator] and is licensed under [licence type], unless otherwise stated.

In these three instances, you have either included all the TASL information required or you are providing an attribution within a context where it is clear what ‘this work’ is referring to. In addition, you have a disclaimer ‘unless otherwise stated’ or ‘unless otherwise noted’, which makes it clear to the user that there are exceptions and that resources with different license terms have been included.

If you don’t acknowledge individual pieces of OER as you use them (such as including an attribution next to a picture you use), you can list these in an acknowledgements or sources list. For example:

Screenshot source: Open Research 2014 ‘Image and Asset Credits’ section by OER Hub is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

The example above shows the image and asset credits page for a course called Open Research 2014. The overall course is openly licensed (CC BY-SA 4.0). The course has a disclaimer similar to those listed above, acknowledging that it contains other OER.

The overall course licence applies to the original content created by the course authors (OER Hub). Openly licensed images used for the course are attributed separately.

Your own practice

When creating OER or adapting material, you should always consider whether it is appropriate to apply a more restrictive licence to your work. Think about the photo ‘90fied’ from earlier in this unit. This adaptation was based on the photo ‘Creative Commons 10^th Birthday Celebration San Francisco’ which is licensed CC BY 2.0. When licensing the adaptation ‘90fied’ it is permitted to apply a more restrictive licence. However, is applying a restrictive licence in the spirit of openness or the original license? If we want to enable reuse in all contexts, where possible we should license our version of the resource CC BY too.

You also need to consider how easy it will be for someone to reuse your new version of a resource. To help others, avoid applying licences described as ‘not recommended but technically possible’ to OER you have adapted.

As we saw in Section 5.2, you should also consider making your resource available in different formats and on different platforms. This will enable people to reuse it more easily.

Final remarks

It can be intimidating to approach remix in a way that is consistent with copyright. In this unit we covered different ways of using OER and how to ensure that we attribute the OER we use appropriately.

Having the knowledge and skills to support the creation of adaptations and collections of OER at your university is critically important for librarians, ICT and support staff. In the next unit we will take a closer look at the role that OER and CC-licensed material could have at your university.

Unit 5 quiz