Fletcher's Open Educational Resources

Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons licensing is at the heart of the OER movement. CC allows creators to specify more flexible forms of copyright that allows "others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work." There are a range of options for the type of use that CC licenses allow:

How To Attribute Creative Commons Photos by Foter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Licensing Types

The following describes each of the six main licenses offered when you choose to publish your work with a Creative Commons license. We have listed them starting with the most accommodating license type you can choose and ending with the most restrictive license type you can choose.

License Conditions

Creators choose a set of conditions they wish to apply to their work.

Attribution (by) All CC licenses require that others who use your work in any way must give you credit the way you request, but not in a way that suggests you endorse them or their use. If they want to use your work without giving you credit or for endorsement purposes, they must get your permission first.

ShareAlike (sa) You let others copy, distribute, display, perform, and modify your work, as long as they distribute any modified work on the same terms. If they want to distribute modified works under other terms, they must get your permission first.

NonCommercial (nc) You let others copy, distribute, display, perform, and (unless you have chosen NoDerivatives) modify and use your work for any purpose other than commercially unless they get your permission first.

NoDerivatives (nd) You let others copy, distribute, display and perform only original copies of your work. If they want to modify your work, they must get your permission first.

Attributing Images and Other Resources

Images that are in the public domain do not need to be credited, though you may want to credit the image to help students understand its relevance. Most images created before 1924 are in the public domain. In addition, many images created by government bodies are also public domain. Most Creative Commons images do need to be credited. These credits can appear anywhere in your project, including a closing credits slide, unless an author asks you to credit their work on the same page that you use it. If you want to make things easy for yourself, just keep a list of credits as you go, and list them at the end. A good credit format is this: “Name of item” by [Author]. [Abbreviation of specific license (i.e. CC-By-SA) with link to license] [link to the item]. Sometimes authors don’t provide their real name. In this case “Wikipedia user [username]” is fine.

Best Practices for attributions - You can use CC-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution. Here are some good (and not so good) examples of attribution. Note: If you want to learn how to mark your own material with a CC license go here.