Most OERs have a Creative Commons license on them. Creative Commons (CC) licenses allow the creator of a work to change the copyright from "all rights reserved" to "some rights reserved". There are a variety of CC licenses authors can choose from and they can be mixed and matched as needed. Many of the licenses allow users to edit the materials and customize them for a different use. Most of the licenses require users to provide credit to the original creator. Some licenses specify that you can remix and reuse, but not for commercial purposes. And there is also an option for limiting the creation of derivative works (although that wouldn't be considered OER anymore). The main CC licenses are listed below, but the Creative Commons website has more useful information about license specifics, and their License Chooser tool is especially helpful for navigating the decisions to make and generating a license for your work.
All images courtesy of Creative Commons.
Attribution (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 (BY) - Non Commercial (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 (BY) - Share Alike (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 (BY) - Non Commercial (NC) - Share Alike (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 (BY) - No Derivatives (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 (BY) - Non Commercial (NC) - No Derivatives (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.
MIT OpenCourseWare has pre-packaged courses for instructors with CC-BY-NC-SA licenses. This means they are usable with attribution if used for non-commercial purposes and share-alike text, meaning all derivates must also use the original license.
Here are additional universities with open education platforms for full courses:
TEDTalks have CC-BY-NC-ND licenses but do add additional parameters. In addition to giving the original source attribution, only using the content for non-commercial purposes, and allowing no derivatives of the content, they also want the content shared with their own embeddable player, rather than being downloaded. Always check the original source's specifications in addition to their CC licenses to understand their preferences for reuse.
Content in this guide page is derived from Open Educational Resources by The University of Texas Austin Libraries under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 Generic License
