Open Educational Resources (OERs): Licensing

Although there are lots of types of open licenses, open educational resources usually use a Creative Commons License. There are seven types of Creative Commons Licenses, including CC0, which means that no rights are reserved:

All Creative Commons Licenses (with the exception of CC0, no rights reserved) include some combination of the following four components. If you know the components, you can read a Creative Commons license!

• Attribution, abbreviated "BY" and symbolized by a little guy in a circle
• ShareAlike, abbreviated "SA" and symbolized by a circular arrow
• NonCommercial, abbreviated "NC" and symbolized by a dollar sign with a slash through it
• No Derivatives, abbreviated "ND" and symbolized by an equals sign

Creative Commons licenses can be spelled out, abbreviated, or conveyed in symbols. For instance, "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike" means the same thing as "CC BY-NC-SA" or .

• Where do I find the license on an OER?
  • For websites, look near the title or at the bottom of the page
  • For books, look on the verso (back of the title page)
• How do I provide attribution?
  • Include the name of the license, title of the work, name of the author, and a link to where you found it. This information can be in any order or format.
    • Example: "Library 1" CC BY-NC-ND Ken Hawkins at https://flic.kr/p/923VJQ
    • Example: Adapted from Michael Boland's "An Introduction to Cooperation and Mutualism," in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license
• How does ShareAlike work?
  • "ShareAlike" means that you can edit or remix the work, but any adaptations have to be posted under the same license as the original work.
• Are there any licenses that I should avoid?
  • If you want to edit a resource, make sure the license doesn't contain the "no derivatives" component.
• As an educator, do I need to worry about the "noncommercial" component?
  • In general, using OERs for your course is considered noncommercial. However, it is unclear whether selling printed copies on a cost-recovery basis is "noncommercial," so if you want your students to have a print copy of a resource with this license component, they should probably print it themselves.

The content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.