Skip to Main Content

OER and other Open Resources: Creative Commons

Open Educational Resources (OER) are all the rage today. What are they and how can you use them?

Two public domain tools

Creative Commons and Copyright

CC licenses do not affect copyright.

  • They are built on copyright law.

  • They have no affect what as ever to fair use or fair dealings and TEACH Act.


(Creative, 2020, p. 46)

Remixing CC-licensed work

Creative Commons Charts

Citing Creative Commons Licensed Work

Best Practice recommended to use for citing CC work is TASL: Title, Author, Source, License.

Title - What is the title of the work you are citing? Sometimes there is no stated title.

Author - Who created the work. This can be author, licensor, copyright holder, or a request to give credit to some other entity.

Source -  Where can others find the work. This can be a hyperlink or URL of where you found the work.

License - How can the work be used? Specify the CC license found on work.

Modified from Creative Commons' wiki page, "Best practices for attribution." Using TASL, this is the citation:

"Best practices for attribution." Creative Commons. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/best_practices_for_attribution#:~:text=

Whenever%20you%20are%20reusing%20CC,think%20of%20the%20acronym%3A%20TASL. CC-BY-4.0

Title: Best practices for attribution

Author: Creative Commons

Source: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/best_practices_for_attribution#:~:text=

Whenever%20you%20are%20reusing%20CC,think%20of%20the%20acronym%3A%20TASL.

License: CC-BY-4.0

 

The three layers of the CC licenses

Four CC license elements

What is a collection?

 

Remixing, Adaptation, Derivative, and Collection of CC-license

Remixing, adaptation, and derivative works have to have compatible licenses.

For my aquarium I used images of fish that were in the public domain, one fish I adapted, and a fish that had a CC BY-NC. I can make a license for this image as a whole with CC BY-NC-SA If there was picture of a fish that I wanted to use in my aquarium with a license of CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC-ND I cannot share the image.

If I made collection of aquariums, and one of those aquariums has a license with ND in it, but the whole collection has a license of CC BY-SA. I can share and others can adapt the collection to their needs except the aquarium that has the license with ND in it.

Creative Commons

Since works don’t have to be registered or display a © anymore to indicate they are under copyright, the need arose to indicate when an author/creator wants to make their work available with less restrictions.  OER publications generally have a Creative Commons license.  There are several levels of CC license:

  •  CC0   -  CC0 – No rights reserved/Public domain.  Author/creator waives their copyrights and places the work in the public domain
  •  - CC BY – Allows for others to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as they credit author/creator for the original creation.
  • CC BY-SA – Allows for others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit author/creator and license their new creations under the identical terms.
  •  - CC BY-ND – Allows for others to reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to author/creator.
  • - CC BY-NC – Allows for others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge author/creator and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
  • - CC BY-NC-SA – Allows for others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as they credit author/creator and license their new creations under the identical terms.
  • - CC BY-NC-ND – Allows for others to download the 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.

For more detailed information on Creative Commons visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

List of Creative Commons Licenses and References

The figures used throughout this page are CC-licensed works or are available in the public domain. The list below includes the URLs for each CC license or public domain tool referenced in the figures, so you can easily navigate to the appropriate license.

Сс-license-layers.png ‎(296 × 383 pixels, file size: 39 KB, MIME type: image/png) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%A1%D1%81-license-layers.png

Colorful Aquarium by MALIZ ONG from https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=51717&picture=colorful-aquarium with CC0 license

Downloads - Creative Commons Elements  https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads/

Fish. smedley. No Source. No license

No Title. No Author. https://pxhere.com/en/photo/960558 Creative Commons CC0

Creative commons for educators and librarians (Creative Commons, Comp.) [PDF]. (2020). Unit 3: Anatomy of a CC license. pp. 39 - 60.

Creative commons for educators and librarians (Creative Commons, Comp.) [PDF]. (2020). Unit 4: Using CC Licenses and CC-Licensed Works. pp. 61- 89.