Open Educational Resources (OERs): Copyright and Attribution

Creative Commons offers different licenses that allow reusers to do different things with the material. Learn more here, or check out our quick guide below.

Attribution
CC BY

This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, 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, adapt, 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 lets others reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to you.

Attribution-NonCommercial
CC BY-NC

This license lets others remix, adapt, 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, adapt, 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 our 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.

Adapting

Check the license to make sure you have the permission to modify the contents.

It is easiest to edit the OER using its original format. Please note: Avoid PDF documents as they are not editable and will need to be converted to other formats before editing.

Using Open Author to edit or create OERs:

• Creating with Open Author
• How to Use Open Author

Authoring

Want to create your own OER? Start by choosing your Creative Commons License.

Attribute the OER to properly give credit to the creator or copyright holders. Follow TASL and attribute:

• Title
• Author (tell reusers who to give credit to)
• Source (give reusers a link to the resource)
• License (link to the CC license deed)

Use this free attribution builder to make it easy! Or read more about the full legal requirements on the Creative Commons site.

If you've adapted or modified the OER

You should always attribute the original work in any derivative work and identify that changes have been made. Often the simplest way to do this is to use the phrase “Adapted from …” or “This work is a derivative of…” and attribute the original work as you would normally. If your work incorporates a number of derivative works, you might say, “Adapted from the following sources…” and list each original work sequentially. Keep in mind that materials that have the Non-Derivatives license term (CC-BY-ND, CC-BY-NC-ND) are only allowed to be copied or redistributed as-is but NOT remixed.

Where to put an attribution

For text resources (eg. books, worksheets, PowerPoint slides, etc), include the attribution details where it naturally makes sense, such as immediately preceding or following the work, or as the footer along the bottom of the page on which the CC work appears. For videos, include the attribution information near the work as it appears on screen during the video. For sound recordings (eg podcasts), mention the name of the artist during the recording (like a radio announcement) and provide full attribution details in text near the podcast where it is being stored (eg. blog, school intranet, learning management system, etc).

Examples

Image attribution:

"Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by Timothy Vollmer is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Modified image:

"Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by Timothy Vollmer, used under CC BY 4.0 / Cropped from original

Created adaptation:

This work, "90fied", is adapted from "Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by Timothy Vollmer, used under CC BY 4.0. "90fied" is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by [Your name here].

Music:

Theme music: “Day Bird” by Broke for Free (brokeforfree.com). Available for use under the CC BY 3.0 license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), at [Free Music Archive].

Text:

This chapter is from “Don't Know JS Yet (2nd Edition)” by Simpson. The book is licensed under the BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. © 2019-2022 Kyle Simpson.

Public domain materials:

“Milkmaid” by Vermeer. The Rijksmuseum collection. The image is dedicated to the public domain under CC0.