When choosing which license to apply to your original content, consider this:

“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.” Tim O’Reilly, Ideas Blog

This can also apply to educators, and is a common argument for keeping OER more open.

Some questions to consider:

Do you want to allow modification to your work?

To allow modification means that others can correct, actualize, improve and adapt the content. This ability to modify can help to ensure that the content will be used for longer and more often because people don’t feel restricted by how they’ll share and reuse it. If you decide to allow modification, you can choose the “share alike” option. This means, that every modification has to be published under the same license.

Do you want to allow others to copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only?

That means that other people are not allowed to use the work for anything that has a commercial end. This might impact even those teaching in public schools or universities. It is good where you have concerns that a publisher might be interested, and you want such an entity to ask for permission to use it in a book or other format that he wants to sell.

Do you want to allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work?

This means that the work has to contain the “share alike” condition. Be aware that it is very hard for other content creators to reuse “share alike” content, if they like to mix up open content with a different license.

Do you want to let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it?

No changes means using the no derivative condition. This means no changes can be made to your work — the entire body of content (including any images, activities, videos, or learning material of any kind) must be used as is.

Selecting a License for Remixed Work

If you are using other licensed content in your work, you need to consider how licenses will work together. For example, let’s say you found a graph that you want to use in your open book. The graph is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license, but you want to license your book as CC-BY. You would allow commercial use of your book, but the copyright holder of the graph does not want to allow commercial use of their product. Thus, you would have to decide to either not use the graph or not use the CC-BY license. The only way to mix these two works is to use a CC-BY-NC-SA license.

You may run into issues like this if you are combining content into one cohesive whole. It is a good idea to ensure your licenses are compatible. This license compatibility chart can help you determine what licenses can be combined in what ways.

Access the original license compatibility chart from Creative Commons

You can also work through the Creative Commons license chooser to select an appropriate license for your work.

Creative Commons License Chooser

Creative Commons Australia also provides an excellent flowchart that can help you determine which Creative Commons license would best suit your work.

Which Creative Commons License is Right for Me?

Citing vs. Attribution

“Citation” and “Attribution” are often used as synonyms, but they mean two different things. Citation is a scholarly practice for tracking the ideological underpinnings of a work, usually referencing sources like published books, articles, government documents, primary sources, etc. Attribution is about crediting a copyright holder according to the terms of a copyright license, usually crediting artistic works like music, fiction, video, and photography.

No matter the content, make sure you credit the creator, provide the URL where the work is hosted, indicate if it is available under a particular license, provide a link to the license (so others can find out the license terms), and link to the original resource.

In the example below, the photographer Sarah Macmillan (username: EssjayNZ on Flickr) has chosen to share her images on Flickr under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. You can reuse this image, according to the terms of the BY-NC-SA license, as long as you provide proper attribution.

New Zealand, Clouds – 6.10pm” by EssjayNZ – CC: BY-NC-SA

Explore the Best Practices for Attribution page on the Creative Commons Wiki for more information on how to cite and attribute Creative Commons works.

Write on this Course: Raising Concerns

As you have progressed through this course, you have learned about the affordances that open licenses bring. At the same time, you may have concerns about what it means to create and share new content that is open and accessible to all.

Share your thoughts on sharing original content by responding to these questions:

• • What are some concerns about sharing original content openly?

• How might you address or respond to these concerns?

You can use Hypothesis to add your answers as public annotations to this page. Comments are welcome anywhere on the page. Please use the tag #SUNYOERChat in your posts.

“Hypothes.is_logo.jpg” by Hypothes.is is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

This content is adapted from the following works:

“Attribute Open Content” by Open Michigan, licensed under CC BY 4.0

“Best Practices for Attribution” by Creative Commons, licensed under CC BY 4.0

Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.