Creative Commons Certificate for Educators and Librarians

Creative Commons

Creative Commons Certificate for Educators and Librarians by Creative Commons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

This book was produced using Pressbooks.com.

Contents

- Part I. Unit 1: What Is Creative Commons

- 1. 1. What Is Creative Commons?

- 2. 1.1 The Story of Creative Commons

- 3. 1.2 Creative Commons Today

- 4. Additional Resources

- Part II. Unit 2: Copyright Law

- 5. 2. Copyright Law

- 6. 2.1 Copyright Basics

- 7. 2.2 Global Aspects of Copyright

- 8. 2.3 The Public Domain

- 9. 2.4 Exceptions and Limitations to Copyright

- 10. Additional Resources

- Part III. Unit 3: Anatomy of a CC License

- 11. 3. Anatomy of a CC License

- 12. 3.1 License Design and Terminology

- 13. 3.2 License Scope

- 14. 3.3 License Types

- 15. 3.4 License Enforceability

- 16. Additional Resources

- Part IV. Unit 4: Using CC Licenses and CC-Licensed Works

- 17. 4. Using CC Licenses and CC Licensed Works

- 18. 4.1 Choosing and Applying a CC License

- 19. 4.2 Things to Consider after CC Licensing

- 20. 4.3 Finding and Reusing CC-Licensed Work

- 21. 4.4 Remixing CC-Licensed Work

- 22. Additional Resources

- Part V. Unit 5: CC for Educators

- 23. 5. CC for Educators

- 24. 5.1 OER, Open Textbooks, and Open Courses

- 25. 5.2 Finding, Evaluating, and Adapting Resources

- 26. 5.3 Creating and Sharing OER

- 27. 5.4 Open Pedagogy / Practices

- 28. 5.5 Opening Up Your Institution

- 29. Additional Resources

- Part VI. Unit 5: CC for Librarians

- 30. 5. Creative Commons for Librarians

- 31. 5.1 Open Access to Scholarship

- 32. 5.2 OER, Open Textbooks, Open Courses

- 33. 5.3 Finding, Evaluating, and Adapting Resources

- 34. 5.4 Creating and Sharing OER

- 35. 5.5 Opening up Your Institution

- 36. Additional Resources

I

Unit 1: What Is Creative Commons

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1. What Is Creative Commons?

Unit 1: What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a set of legal tools, a nonprofit organization, as well as a global network and a movement — all inspired by people’s willingness to share their creativity and knowledge, and enabled by a set of open copyright licenses.

Creative Commons began in response to an outdated global copyright legal system. CC licenses are built on copyright and are designed to give more options to creators who want to share. Over time, the role and value of Creative Commons has expanded. This unit will introduce you to where CC came from and where it is headed.

This unit has two sections:

1.1 The Story of Creative Commons

1.2 Creative Commons Today

There are also additional resources if you are interested in learning more about any of the topics covered in this unit.

Note: Completing the CC Certificate does not entitle learners to provide legal advice on copyright, fair use / fair dealing or open licensing. The content in this course and the information Certificate facilitators share is also not legal advice. While you should not share legal advice to others based on course content, you will develop a high level of expertise upon completion of this course. You will learn a lot about copyright, open licensing and open practices in various communities. Upon graduation, you should feel comfortable sharing the facts about copyright and open licensing, case studies and good open practices.

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1.1 The Story of Creative Commons

To understand how a set of copyright licenses could inspire a global movement, you need to know a bit about the origin of Creative Commons.

Learning Outcomes

- Retell the story of why Creative Commons was founded

- Identify the role of copyright law in the creation of Creative Commons

Big Question / Why It Matters

What were the legal and cultural reasons for the founding of Creative Commons? Why has CC grown into a global movement?

CC’s founders recognized the mismatch between what technology enables and what copyright restricts, and they provided an alternative approach for creators who want to share their work. Today that approach is used by millions of creators around the globe.

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

When did you first learn about Creative Commons? Think about how you would articulate what CC is to someone who has never heard of it. To fully understand the organization, it helps to start with a bit of history.

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

The story of Creative Commons begins with copyright. You’ll learn a lot more about copyright later in the course, but for now it’s enough to know that copyright is an area of law that regulates the way the products of human creativity are used – like books, academic research articles, music, and art. Copyright grants a set of exclusive rights to a creator, so that the creator has the ability to prevent others from copying and adapting her work for a limited time. In other words, copyright law strictly regulates who is allowed to copy and share with whom.

The internet has given us the opportunity to access, share, and collaborate on human creations (all governed by copyright) at an unprecedented scale. The sharing capabilities made possible by digital technology are in tension with the sharing restrictions embedded within copyright laws around the world.

Creative Commons was created to help address the tension between creator’s ability to share digital works globally and copyright regulation. The story begins with a particular piece of copyright legislation in the United States. It was called the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), and it was enacted in 1998. It extended the term of copyright for every work in the United States—even those already published—for an additional 20 years, so the copyright term equaled the life of the creator plus 70 years. (This move put the U.S. copyright term in line with some other countries, though many more countries remain at 50 years after the creator’s death to this day.)

Fun fact: the CTEA was commonly referred to as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act because the extension came just before the original Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, would have fallen into the public domain.

Larry Lessig giving #ccsummit2011 keynote”. DTKindler Photo. CC BY 2.0 Unported

Stanford Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig, believed this new law was unconstitutional. The term of copyright had been continually extended over the years. The end of a copyright term is important—it marks the moment the work moves into the public domain for everyone to use for any purpose without permission. This is a critical part of the equation in the copyright system. All creativity and knowledge builds on what came before, and the end of a copyright term ensures that copyrighted works eventually join the pool of knowledge and creativity from which we can all draw to create new works.

The new law was also hard to align with the purpose of copyright as it is written into the U.S. Constitution—to create an incentive for authors to share their works by granting them a limited monopoly over them. How could the law possibly further incentivize the creation of works that already existed?

Lessig represented a web publisher, Eric Eldred, who had made a career of making works available as they passed into the public domain. Together, they challenged the constitutionality of the Act. The case, known as Eldred v. Ashcroft, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Eldred lost.

Enter Creative Commons

Inspired by the value of Eldred’s goal to make more creative works freely available on the internet, and responding to a growing community of bloggers who were creating, remixing and sharing content, Lessig and others came up with an idea. They created a nonprofit organization called Creative Commons and, in 2002, they published the Creative Commons licenses—a set of free, public licenses that would allow creators to keep their copyrights while sharing their works on more flexible terms than the default “all rights reserved.” Copyright is automatic, whether you want it or not. And while some people want to reserve all of their rights, many want to share their work with the public more freely. The idea behind CC licensing was to create an easy way for creators who wanted to share their works in ways that were consistent with copyright law.

From the start, Creative Commons licenses were intended to be used by creators all over the world. The CC founders were initially motivated by a piece of U.S. copyright legislation, but similarly restrictive copyright laws all over the world restricted how our shared culture and collective knowledge could be used, even while digital technologies and the internet have opened new ways for people to participate in culture and knowledge production.

Watch this short video, A Shared Culture, to get a sense for the vision behind Creative Commons.

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Jesse Dylan.  CC BY-NC-SA

Since Creative Commons was founded, much has changed in the way people share and how the internet operates. In many places around the world, the restrictions on using creative works have increased. Yet sharing and remix are the norm online. Think about your favorite video mashup or even the photos your friend posted on social media last week. Sometimes this type of sharing and remix happen in violation of copyright law, and sometimes they happen within social media networks that do not allow those works to be shared on other parts of the web.

In domains like textbook publishing, academic research, documentary film, and many more, restrictive copyright rules continue to inhibit creation, access, and remix. CC tools are helping to solve this problem. Today Creative Commons licenses are used by more than 1.4 billion works online across 9 million websites. The grand experiment that started more than 15 years ago has been a success, including in ways unimagined by CC’s founders.

More details on the State of the Commons can be found at https://stateof.creativecommons.org/

While other custom open copyright licenses have been developed in the past, we recommend using Creative Commons licenses because they are up to date, free-to-use, and have been broadly adopted by governments, institutions and individuals as the global standard for open copyright licenses.

In the next section, you’ll learn more about what Creative Commons looks like today—the licenses, the organization, and the movement.

Final remarks

Technology makes it possible for online content to be consumed by millions of people at once, and it can be copied, shared, and remixed with speed and ease. But copyright law places limits on our ability to take advantage of these possibilities. Creative Commons was founded to help us realize the full potential of the internet.

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1.2 Creative Commons Today

As a set of legal tools, a nonprofit, as well as a global network and movement, Creative Commons has evolved in many ways over the course of its history.

Learning Outcomes

- Differentiate between Creative Commons as a set of licenses, a movement, and a nonprofit organization

- Explain the role of the CC Global Network

- Describe the basic areas of work for CC as a nonprofit organization

Big Question / Why It Matters

Now we know why Creative Commons was started. But what is Creative Commons today?

Today CC licenses are prevalent across the web and are used by creators around the world for every type of content you can imagine. The open movement, which extends beyond just CC licenses, is a global force of people committed to the idea that the world is better when we share and work together. Creative Commons is the nonprofit organization that stewards the CC licenses and helps support the open movement.

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

When you think about Creative Commons, do you think about the licenses? Activists seeking copyright reform? A useful tool for sharing? Symbols in circles? Something else?

Are you involved with Creative Commons as a creator, a reuser, and/or an advocate? Would you like to be?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Today, the CC licenses and public domain tools are used on more than 1.4 billion works, from songs to YouTube videos to scientific research. The licenses have helped a global movement come together around openness, collaboration, and shared human creativity. CC the nonprofit organization, once housed within the basement of Stanford Law School, now has a staff working around the world on a host of different projects in various domains.

We’ll take these aspects of Creative Commons—the licenses, the movement, and the organization—and look at each in turn.

Creative Commons: The Licenses

CC legal tools are an alternative for creators who choose to share their works with the public under more permissive terms than the default “all rights reserved” approach under copyright. The legal tools are integrated into user-generated content platforms like YouTube, Flickr, and Jamendo, and they are used by nonprofit open projects like Wikipedia and OpenStax. They are used by formal institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Europeana, and individual creators. For a creative take on Creative Commons and copyright, listen to this songby Jonathan “Song-A-Day” Mann about his choice to use CC licenses for his music.

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Won’t Lock it Down. Jonathan “Song-A-Day” Mann. CC BY.

In addition to giving creators more choices for how to share their work, CC legal tools serve important policy goals in fields like scholarly publishing and education. Watch the brief video, Why Open Education Matters, to get a sense for the opportunities Creative Commons licenses create for education.

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Why Open Education Matters. David Blake. CC BY.

Collectively, the legal tools help create a global commons of diverse types of content—from picture storybooks to comics —that is freely available for anyone to use.

CC licenses also serve a non-copyright function. They signal a set of values and a different way of operating.

For some users, this means harkening back to the economic model of the commons. As economist David Bollier describes it, “a commons arises whenever a given community decides it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability.” Wikipedia is a good example of a commons-based community around CC-licensed content.

For others, the CC legal tools and their buttons express an affinity for a set of core values. CC buttons have become ubiquitous symbols for sharing, openness, and human collaboration. The CC logo and icons are now part of the permanent design collection at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

While there is no single motivation for using CC licenses, there is a basic sense that CC licensing is rooted in a fundamental belief that knowledge and creativity are building blocks of our culture rather than simple commodities from which to extract market value. The licenses reflect a belief that everyone has something to contribute, and that no one can own our shared culture. Fundamentally, they reflect a belief in the promise of sharing.

Creative Commons: the Movement

Over the years, a global coalition of people has formed around Creative Commons and open licensing. [1] This includes activists working on copyright reform around the globe, policymakers advancing policies mandating open access to research and data, and creators who share a core set of values. Most of the people and institutions who are part of the CC movement are not formally connected to Creative Commons.

The CC Global Network  [2] is just one player in the larger open movement, which includes Wikipedians, Mozillians, open access advocates, and many more.

Open source software is cited as the first domain where networked open sharing produced a tangible benefit as a movement that went much further than technology. The Conversation’s Explainer overview of other movements adds other examples, such as Open Innovation in the corporate world, Open Data (see the Open Data Commons) and Crowdsourcing. There is also the Open Access movement, which aims to make research widely available, the Open Science movement, and the growing movement around Open Educational Resources.

Creative Commons: the Organization

A small nonprofit organization stewards the Creative Commons legal tools and helps power the open movement. CC is a distributed organization, with CC staff and contractors working from various locations around the world.

Creative Commons staff in February 2018, © Creative Commons, CC BY 4.0.

In 2016, Creative Commons embarked on a new organizational strategy based on building and sustaining a vibrant, usable commons, powered by collaboration and gratitude. This is a shift to focusing not only on the number of works out there under CC licenses and available for reuse, but on the connections and collaborations that happen around that content.  This video introduces the new strategy (optional).

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Creative Commons: Remix, video by Creative Commons. CC BY SA 3.0

Guided by that strategy, organizational work loosely falls into two main buckets:

Licenses, Tools and Technology
The CC licenses and public domain tools are the core legal tools designed and stewarded by CC. While our licenses have been rigorously vetted by legal experts around the globe, our work is not done. We are actively working on technical infrastructure designed to make it easier to find and use content in the digital commons. We are also thinking about ways to better adapt all of CC’s legal and technical tools for today’s web.

Supporting the movement
CC works to help people within open movements collaborate on projects and work toward similar goals. Through CC’s multiple programs, we work directly with our global community—across education, culture, science, copyright reform, government policy, and other sectors—to help train and empower open advocates around the world.

Final remarks

Creative Commons has grown from a law school basement into a global organization with a wide reach and a powerful name associated with a core set of shared values. It is, at the same time, a set of licenses, a movement, and a nonprofit organization. We hope this unit helped give you a sense for what the organization does and, even more importantly, how you can join us in our work.

1. While other custom open copyright licenses have been developed in the past, we recommend using Creative Commons licenses because they are up to date, free-to-use, and have been broadly adopted by governments, institutions and individuals as the global standard for open copyright licenses. ↵

2. The work of the CC Global Network is organized into what we call “Network Platforms,” which are areas of work. Anyone interested in working on a Platform can join and contribute as much or as little time and effort as they choose. Take a look through the list of active Platforms to see if there is an area of work that interests you. If so, please get involved! ↵

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Additional Resources

More information about CC history

How I Lost the Big One by Lawrence Lessig.

- Lawrence Lessig describes the details of the Eldred case

- http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_lessig_marapr04.msp

Excerpt from Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. CC BY-NC 1.0

- Excerpt that provides more background on the Eldred case: http://www.authorama.com/free-culture-18.html

More information about CC and open licensing

Why Open Education Matters, by David Blake @ Degreed. CC BY 3.0

- A brief video that explains how open education is enabled by the internet, why it is valuable for the global community, and how Creative Commons licenses enable open education

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJWbVt2Nc-I

We Copy Like We Breathe, by Cory Doctorow.

- A keynote address that explains copying and how the internet has changed the space of
copying. This frames the need for adequate licensing as we copy and share online

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfU6e6–izo

We Need to Talk About Sharing, by Ryan Merkley @ Creative Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0

- A brief discussion about the value of sharing, how sharing can improve communities,and how Creative Commons enables sharing

- https://vimeo.com/151666798

More information about the Commons

How Does the Commons Work by The Next System Project, adapted from Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm. CC BY 3.0

- Video explaining how a commons works, adapted from economist David Bollier’s explanation of what a commons is, and threats to the commons.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bQiBcd7mBc

The Commons Short and Sweet by David Bollier. CC BY 3.0

- A brief blog post explanation of a commons, some problems of a commons, and what enables a commons to occur

- http://bollier.org/commons-short-and-sweet

The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State by David Bollier & Silke Helfrich. CC BY-SA 3.0

- A book that seeks many voices to gather descriptions of what types of resources exist in the commons, geographic circumstances relating to the commons, and the political relevance of the commons

- http://wealthofthecommons.org/

Enclosure Wikipedia Article. CC BY-SA 3.0

- An article describing enclosure, which is an issue that presents itself in a commons

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

The Political Economy of the Commons by Yochai Benkler. CC BY 3.0

- A brief article that explains how common infrastructure can sustain the commons

- https://web.archive.org/web/20130617041302/http://www.boell.org/downloads/Benkler_The_Political_Economy_of_the_commons.pdf

The Tragedy of the Commons by Boundless & Lumen Learning

- A section of an economics course textbook that explains the economic principles underlying potential threats to the commons

- https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-economics/chapter/common-resources/

Debunking the Tragedy of the Commons by On the Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0

- A short article describing how the tragedy of the commons can be overcome

- http://www.onthecommons.org/debunking-tragedy-commons

Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing a Commons by On the Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0

- A short history of economist Elinor Ostrom and the 8 principles for managing a commons that she has established

- http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

More information about other open movements

Free Culture Game by Molle Industria. CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

- A game to help understand the concept of free culture

- http://www.molleindustria.org/en/freeculturegame/

Participant Recommended Resources

CC Certificate participants’ recommended many additional resources through Hypothes.is annotations on the Certificate website. While Creative Commons has not vetted these resources, we wanted to highlight participant’s contributions here: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccerteducomments/chapter/additional-resources

II

Unit 2: Copyright Law

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2. Copyright Law

Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright. They are built on top of it.

The default of “all rights reserved” copyright is that all rights to copy and adapt a work are reserved by the author or creator (with some important exceptions that you will learn about shortly). Creative Commons licenses adopt a “some rights reserved” approach, enabling an author or creator to free up their works for reuse by the public under certain conditions. To understand how Creative Commons licenses work, it is important that you have a basic understanding of copyright.

This unit has four sections:

2.1 Copyright Basics

2.2 Global Aspects of Copyright

2.3 The Public Domain

2.4 Exceptions and Limitations of Copyright

Note: This unit is important because Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools depend on copyright in order to work. While some aspects of copyright law are harmonized around the world, the laws of copyright vary –sometimes dramatically – from country to country. The information contained in this unit is not intended to be exhaustive or to cover all aspects of the complex laws of copyright around the world, or even every aspect of copyright that may impact how the licenses operate in a particular situation. It is intended to provide an overview of the basic concepts that are most important to understanding how Creative Commons licenses operate. There are also additional resources if you are interested in learning more about copyright topics covered in or excluded from this unit.

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2.1 Copyright Basics

Is copyright confusing to you? Get some clarity by understanding its history and purpose.

Big Question / Why It Matters

Why do we have laws that restrict the copying and sharing of creative work? How do those laws work in the context of the internet, where nearly everything we do involves making a copy?

Copyright law is an important area of law, one that reaches into nearly every facet of our lives, whether we know it or not. Aspects of our lives that in some instances are not regulated by copyright – like reading a physical book – become regulated by copyright when technology is used to share the same book posted to the internet. Because almost everything we do online involves making a copy, copyright is a regular feature in our lives.

Learning Outcomes

- Trace the basic history of copyright

- Explain the purpose of copyright

- Explain how copyright is automatic

- Explain general copyright terms

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

Think back to a time that you invested significant effort into a creative project. What was your motivation for doing so? Did you know at the time you were creating a work very likely protected by copyright that restricted most reuses by others without your permission? Did or would knowing that make a difference to you? If so, why?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge – an Overview

You might not realize it, but copyright law is as integral to your daily life as local traffic laws. Copyright law is the area of law that limits how others may use the original works of authors (or creators, as we often call them) — works spanning the spectrum from novels and operas, to cat videos, to scribbles on a napkin.

Although copyright laws vary from country to country, there are certain commonalities among copyright laws globally. This is largely due to international treaties. These treaties are explained in detail in section 2.2.

There are some important fundamentals you need to be aware of regarding what is copyrightable, as well as who controls the rights and can grant permission to reuse a copyrighted work.

1. Copyright grants a set of exclusive rights to creators, which means that no one else can copy, distribute, perform, adapt or otherwise use the work in violation of those exclusive rights. This gives creators the means to control the use of their works by others, thereby incentivizing them to create new works in the first place. The person who controls the rights, however, may not always be the author. It is important to understand who controls the exclusive rights granted by copyright in order to understand who has authority to grant permissions to others to reuse the work (e.g., adding a CC license to the work). For example:

- Work created in the course of your employment may be subject to differing degrees of employer ownership based on your jurisdiction. Australia, Japan, the the United Kingdom and the United States adhere to some form of a doctrine commonly known as “work-for-hire.” This doctrine generally provides that if you have created a copyrightable work within the scope of your employment, the employer is the owner of, and controls, the economic rights in the copyrighted work even though you are the author and may retain your moral rights.

- Independent contractors may or may not own and control copyright in the works they create in that capacity – that determination most always depends on the terms of the contract between you and the organization that engaged you to perform the work, even though you are the author and may have moral rights.

- Teachers, university faculty, and learners may or may not own and control copyright in the works they create in those capacities – that determination will depend on laws (such as work-for-hire in some instances), and the terms of the employment or contractor agreement, university or school policies, and terms of enrollment at the particular institution, even though you are the author and may have moral rights.

- If you have co-created an original work that is subject to copyright, you may be a joint owner, not an exclusive owner, of the rights granted by copyright law. Joint ownership generally allows all owners to exercise the exclusive rights granted by law, but requires the owners to be accountable to one another for certain uses they make of their joint work.

- Ownership and control of rights afforded by copyright laws are complicated. For more information, please see the additional resources.

2. Copyright does not protect facts or ideas themselves, only the expression of those facts or ideas. That may sound simple, but unfortunately it is not. The difference between an idea and the expression of that idea can be tricky, but it’s also extremely important to understand. While copyright law gives creators control over the expression of an idea, it does not allow the copyright holder to own or exclusively control the idea itself.

3. As a general rule, copyright is automatic the moment a work is fixed in a tangible medium. For example, you have a copyright as soon as you type the first stanza of your poem or record a song in most countries. Registering your copyright with a local copyright authority allows you to officially record your authorship, and in some countries this may be necessary to enforce your rights or might provide you with certain other advantages. But generally speaking, you do not have to register your work to become a copyright holder.

4. Copyright protection lasts a long time. More on this later, but for now it’s enough to know that copyright lasts a long time, often many decades after the creator dies.

Note: The combination of very long terms with automatic entry into the copyright system has created a massive amount of so-called “orphan works” — copyrighted works for which the copyright holder is unknown or impossible to locate.

A Simple History of Copyright

Arguably, the world’s most important early copyright law was enacted in 1710 in England: the Statute of Anne, “An act for the encouragement of learning, by vesting the copies of printed books in the authors or purchasers of such copies, during the times therein mentioned.” This law gave book publishers 14 years of legal protection from the copying of their books by others.

Since then, the scope of the exclusive rights granted under copyright has expanded. Today, copyright law extends far beyond books, to cover nearly anything with even a fragment of creativity or originality created by humans.

Additionally, the duration of the exclusive rights has also expanded. Today, in many parts of the world, the term of copyright granted an individual creator is the life of the creator plus an additional 50 years. See the “Worldwide map of copyright term length” reproduced in Section 2.2 for more details about the duration of copyright and its variances worldwide.

And finally, since the Statue of Anne, copyright treaties have been signed by many countries. The result is that copyright laws have been harmonized to some degree around the world. You will learn more about the most important treaties and how copyright works around the world in Section 2.2.

Watch the 9-minute YouTube video from #FixCopyright for a short history of copyright and its relation to creativity and sharing.

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Copy (aka copyright) Tells the Story of His Life,  by FixCopyright. CC BY 3.0.

Purpose of Copyright

There are two primary rationales for copyright law, though rationales do vary among legal traditions.

Utilitarian: Under this rationale, copyright is designed to provide an incentive to creators. The aim is to encourage the creation of new works.

Author’s rights: Under this rationale, copyright is primarily intended to ensure attribution for authors and preserve the integrity of creative works. The aim is to recognize and protect the deep connection authors have with their creative works. Learn more about author’s rights in the additional resources section.

While different legal systems identify more strongly with one or the other of these rationales, or have other rationales particular to their legal traditions, many copyright systems are influenced by and draw from both (due, in large part, to historical reasons that are outside the scope of this material). Do one or both of these justifications resonate with you? What other reasons do you believe support or don’t support the granting of exclusive rights to creators of original works?

Drawing on the author’s rights tradition, most countries have moral rights that protect, sometimes indefinitely, the bond between an author and her creative output. Moral rights are distinct from the rights granted to copyright holders to restrict others from economically exploiting their works, but closely connected.

The two most common types of moral rights are the right to be recognized as the author of the work (known traditionally as the “right of paternity”), and the right to protect the work’s integrity (generally, the right to object to distortion of or the introduction of undesired changes to the work).

Not all countries have moral rights, but in some parts of the world they are considered so integral that they cannot be licensed away or waived by creators, and they last indefinitely. Please see additional resources for more information about these important rights.

How copyright works – a primer

Copyright applies to works of original authorship, which means works that are unique and not a copy of someone else’s work, and most of the time requires fixation in a tangible medium (written down, recorded, saved to your computer, etc.).

Copyright law establishes the basic terms of use that apply automatically to these original works. These terms give the creator or owner of copyright certain exclusive rights while also recognizing that users have certain rights to use these works without the need for a license or permission.

What’s copyrightable?

In countries that have signed on to the major copyright treaties described in more detail in Section 2.2, copyright exists in the following general categories of works, though sometimes special rules apply on a country-by-country basis. A specific country’s copyright laws almost always further specify types of works within each category. Can you think of a type of work within each category?

- Literary and artistic works

- Translations, adaptations, arrangements of music and alterations of literary and artistic works

- Collections of literary and artistic works

Additionally, depending on the country, original works of authorship may also include, among others:

- Applied art and industrial designs and models

- Computer software

What are the exclusive rights granted?

Creators who have copyright get exclusive rights to control certain uses of their works by others, such as the following (note that other rights may exist depending on the country):

- to make authorized translations of their works

- to make copies of their works

- to publicly perform and communicate their works to the public, including via broadcast

- to make adaptations and arrangements of their works

This means that if you own the copyright to a particular book, no one else can copy or adapt that book without your permission (with important caveats, which we will get to later in Section 2.3). Keep in mind there is an important difference between being the copyright holder of a novel and controlling how a particular authorized copy of the novel is used. While the copyright owner owns the exclusive rights to make copies of the novel, the person who owns a particular physical copy of the novel, for example, can generally do what they want with it, such as loan it to a friend or sell it to a used bookstore.

One of the exclusive rights of copyright is the right to adapt a work. An adaptation (or a derivative work, as it is sometimes called) is a new work based on a pre-existing work. In some countries, the term “derivative work” is used to describe changes that include but are not limited to “adaptations” as described in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which uses both of these terms in different articles. For purposes of this course and understanding how CC licenses and public domain tools work, the terms “derivative work” and “adaptation” are interchangeable and mean: a work that is created from a pre-existing work through changes that can only be made with the permission of the copyright holder. It is important to note that not all changes to an existing work require permission. Generally, a modification rises to the level of an adaptation or derivative when the modified work is based on the prior work and manifests sufficient new creativity to be copyrightable, such as a translation of a novel from one language to another, or the creation of a screenplay based on a novel.

Copyright owners often grant permission to others to adapt their work. Common examples are translations of a work from one language to another, or adapting a novel into a screenplay for a movie. Adaptations are entitled to their own copyright, but that protection only applies to the new elements that are particular to the adaptation. For example, if the author of a poem gives someone permission to make an adaptation, the person may rearrange stanzas, add new stanzas, and change some of the wording, among other things. Generally, the original author retains all copyright in the elements of the poem that remain in the adaptation, and the person adapting the poem has a copyright in their new contributions to the adapted poem. Creating a derivative work does not eliminate the copyright held by the creator of the pre-existing work.

Special note about additional exclusive rights

There are two other categories of rights that are important to understand because the rights are licensed and referenced by Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools.

- Moral Rights

- As mentioned above, moral rights are an integral feature of many countries’ copyright laws. These rights are recognized in Article 6bis of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (the “Berne Convention”), described in more detail in Section 2.2, and are integrated in the laws of all treaty signatories to some extent. Creative Commons licenses and legal tools account for these rights, and the reality is that they cannot be waived or licensed in many countries even though other exclusive economic rights are waivable or licensable. For resources explaining these important rights in more depth, please see additional resources.

- Similar and Related Rights (including rights known in many countries as “neighboring rights”)

- Closely related to copyright are similar and related rights. These are rights that relate to copyrighted works and grant additional exclusive rights beyond the basic rights granted authors described above. Some of these rights are governed by international treaties, but they also vary country by country. Generally, these rights are designed to give some “copyright-like” rights to those who are not themselves the author but are involved in communicating the work to the public, for example, such as broadcasters and performers. Some countries like Japan have established these rights as part of copyright itself; other countries treat these rights separately from, though closely related to, copyright.

The term “Similar Rights” is used to describe these rights in CC licenses and CC0, as you will learn in Section 3.2.

An in-depth discussion of these rights is beyond the scope of this unit. What is important to be aware of is that they exist, and that Creative Commons licenses and public domain tools cover these rights, thereby allowing those who have such rights to use CC tools to give the public permission to use works in ways that would otherwise violate those rights. Please see additional resources for more information about similar and related rights.

Does the public have any right to use copyrighted works that do not violate the exclusive rights of creators?

All countries that have signed on to major international treaties grant the public some rights to use copyrighted works, without permission, without violating the exclusive rights given creators. These are generally called “exceptions and limitations” to copyright. Many countries itemize the specific exceptions and limitations on which the public may rely, while some countries have flexible exceptions and limitations such as the concept of “fair use” in the United States, “fair dealing” in some Commonwealth countries, and education-specific exceptions and limitations in many other parts of the world, including the global south. Exploring these concepts in detail is reserved for Section 2.4. What is important to know is that copyright law does not require permission of the creator for every use of a copyrighted work – some uses are permitted as a matter of copyright policy that balances the sometimes competing interests of the copyright owner and the public.

What else should I know about copyright?

As noted at the beginning of this unit, copyright is complex and varies around the world. This unit serves as a general introduction to its central concepts. There are some concepts, such as 1) liability and remedies, 2) licensing and transfer and 3) termination of copyright transfers and licenses that you should be aware of because you are likely to encounter them at some point.  You will find a comprehensive explanation of these concepts and the other issues raised in this unit in the additional resources.

Distinguishing Copyright from Other Types of Intellectual Property

Intellectual property is the term used for rights – established by law – that empower creators to restrict others from using their creative works. Copyright is one type of intellectual property, but there are many others. To help understand copyright, it is important to have a basic understanding of at least two other types of intellectual property rights and the laws that protect those rights.

- Trademark law generally protects the public from being confused about the source of a good, service, or establishment. The holder of a trademark is generally allowed to prevent uses of its trademark by others if the public will be confused. Examples of trademarks are the golden arches used by McDonald’s, or the brand name Coca-Cola. Trademark law helps producers of goods and services protect their reputation, and it protects the public by giving them a simple way to differentiate between similar products and services.

- Patent law gives inventors a time-limited monopoly to their inventions — things like mouse traps or new mobile phone technology. Patents typically give inventors the exclusive right to make, have made, use, have used, offer for sale, sell, have sold, or import patentable inventions.

Other types of intellectual property rights include trade secrets, publicity rights, and moral rights as a few examples.

For a brief introduction to the different types of intellectual property, watch the 3-minute video How to register a Trademark (Canada): Trademarks, Patents and Copyrights – What’s the Difference?

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

How to Register a Trademark (Canada): Trademarks, Patents and Copyrights – What’s the Difference? by TheTrademarkGroup. CC BY 3.0.

Final remarks

Digital technology has made it easier than ever to copy and reuse work others have created, and it has made it easier than ever to create and share your own work. In short, copyright is everywhere. Since nearly every use of a work online involves making a copy, copyright law plays a role in nearly everything we do online.

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2.2 Global Aspects of Copyright

Copyright laws vary from country to country, yet we operate in a world where media is global. Over time, there has been an effort to standardize copyright laws around the globe.

Photo dedicated to the public domain by Slava Bowman using CC0

Learning Outcomes

- Learn how the copyright laws of your country may differ from those of other countries

- Identify major international treaties and efforts to harmonize laws around the world

Big Question / Why It Matters

Although copyright laws differ country to country, the internet has made global distribution and sharing of copyrightable works possible with the click of a button. What does that mean for you, when you share your works on the internet and use works published by others outside your country? What law applies to a video taken by someone from India during their travels to Kenya and then posted to YouTube? What about when that video is watched or downloaded by someone in Canada?

Copyright law is locally implemented by every country around the world. In an effort to minimize complexity, efforts have been undertaken to harmonize some of the basic elements of how copyright works across the globe.

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

When you publish or reuse something online, have you ever thought about what law applies to you? Does it make sense to you that different people should have different limits to what they can do with your work based on their geographic location? Why or why not?

Acquiring Essential / Knowledge Introduction to the Global Copyright System

International laws

Every country has its own copyright laws, but over the years there has been extensive global harmonization of copyright laws through treaties and multilateral and bilateral trade agreements. These treaties and agreements establish minimum standards for all participating countries, which then enact or conform their own laws to the agreed-upon limits. This system leaves room for local variation.

These treaties and agreements are negotiated in various fora: the World Intellectual Property Organization (known as “WIPO”), the World Trade Organization (known as the WTO), and in private negotiations between select countries.

The signatories of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, as of 2012. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0

One of the most significant international agreements is the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, concluded in 1886. The Berne Convention has since been revised and amended on several occasions. WIPO serves as administrator of the treaty and its revisions and amendments, and is the depository for official instruments of accession and ratification. Today, more than 176 countries (as of March 2, 2018) have signed the Berne Convention. This treaty (as amended and revised) lays out several fundamental principles upon which all participating countries have agreed. One of those principles is that copyright must be granted automatically – that is, there must be no legal formalities required to obtain copyright protection (for example, national laws of its signatories cannot require you to register or pay for your copyright as a condition to receiving copyright protection). In general, the Berne Convention as revised and amended also requires that all countries give foreign works the same protection they give works created within their borders, assuming the other country is a signatory. Above is a map showing (in blue) the signatories to the Berne Convention as of 2012.

Additionally, the Berne Convention sets minimum standards – default rules – for the duration of copyright protection for creative works, though some exceptions exist depending on the subject matter. The Berne Convention’s standards for copyright protection dictates a minimum term of life of the author plus 50 years. Because the Berne Convention sets minimums only, several countries have established longer terms of copyright for individual creators, such as “life of the author plus 70 years” and “life of the author plus 100 years.” Review the Wikipedia article on copyright term, and view the page that lists the duration of copyright based on country. The map below shows the status of copyright duration around the world as of 2012.

Worldwide map of copyright term length, Balfour Smith, Canuckguy, Badseed, Martsniez – Original image by Balfour Smith at Duke University. CC BY 3.0

In addition to the Berne Convention, several other international agreements have further harmonized copyright rules around the world [1]

National laws

Although an international framework exists because of the Berne Convention and other treaties and agreements, copyright law is enacted and enforced through national laws. Those laws are supported by national copyright offices, which in turn support copyright holders, allow for registration, and provide interpretative guidance. As mentioned, while there has been a major effort to create minimum standards for copyright across the globe, countries still have a significant amount of discretion as to how they meet the requirements imposed by treaties and agreements. That means the details of copyright law still vary quite a bit from country to country.

What law applies to my use of a work restricted by copyright?

A common question of copyright creators and users of their works is which copyright law applies to a particular use of a particular work. Generally, the rule of territoriality applies: national laws are limited in their reach to activities taking place within the country. This also means that generally speaking, the law of the country where a work is used applies to that particular use. If you are distributing a book in a particular country, then the law of the country where you are distributing the book generally applies.

This is true even in the era of the internet, though much harder to apply. For example, if you are a Canadian citizen traveling to Germany and using a copyrighted work in your PowerPoint presentation, then German copyright law normally applies to your use.

It can be complicated to determine which law applies in any given case. This complexity is one of the benefits of Creative Commons licenses, which are designed to be enforceable everywhere.

Final remarks

Even though global copyright treaties and agreements exist, there is no one “international copyright law.” Different countries have different standards for what is protected by copyright, how long copyright lasts and what it restricts, and what penalties apply when it is infringed.

1. International agreements include the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)—negotiated by members of the World Trade Organization in 1994, and the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT)—negotiated by members of the World Intellectual Property Organization in 1996. These agreements address similar issues and also new IP-related issues not covered by the Berne Convention. Another manner in which copyright policy is made is through bilateral and multilateral trade agreements. As of 2017, there are several negotiations underway. These include the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A major drawback of multilateral trade negotiations is that they are typically conducted in secret with little or no participation from civil society organizations and the public. ↵

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2.3 The Public Domain

The public domain consists of creative works that are not subject to copyright. This is the pool of publicly available material from which new creativity and knowledge may be built.

Melies color Voyage dans la lune, by Georges Méliès, Public Domain.

Learning Outcomes

- Explain what the public domain is

- Communicate the value of the public domain

Big Question / Why It Matters

Why is it important that works eventually fall out of copyright? Are there any works that do not qualify for copyright protection and may be freely used?

A critical aspect of copyright law is that the protection it provides does not last forever. After a set term, the copyright expires and the work enters the public domain for everyone to copy, adapt, and share. Likewise, there are certain types of works that fall outside the scope of copyright.

- Special note: moral rights may continue to exist in works that have otherwise entered the public domain. See section 2.1.

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

Have you ever seen ancient Egyptian art in real life? Have you listened to a Beethoven symphony? These works are in the public domain. What other public domain works have you enjoyed in your lifetime? Have you ever created something new using a work in the public domain?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Despite the expansive reach of copyright, there is still a rich (and growing) public domain full of works which are free from copyright. Works enter the public domain in one of four ways:

1. The copyright expires.

While copyright terms are longer than ever before, they are not infinite. In most countries, the term of an individual’s copyright expires 50 years after her death. In some countries, the term is longer and can be up to 100 years after the author dies. Review the map in section 2.2, for an overview of copyright terms around the world.

2.  The work was never entitled to copyright protection.

Copyright covers vast amounts of content created by authors, but certain categories of works fall outside the scope of copyright. For example, works that are purely functional are not copyrightable, like the design of a screw. The Berne Convention identifies additional categories, such as official texts of a legislative, administrative, and legal nature. Further, in some countries, works created by government employees are excluded from copyright protection and are not eligible for copyright. Facts and ideas are never copyrightable.

3.  The creator dedicates the work to the public domain before copyright has expired.

Creative Commons CC0 button, available for download at https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads/

In most parts of the world, a creator can decide to forego the protections of copyright and dedicate their work to the public domain. Creative Commons has a legal tool called CC0 (“CC Zero”) Public Domain Dedication that helps authors put their works into the worldwide public domain to the greatest extent possible. You’ll learn more about this tool (and other Creative Commons legal tools) later in the course.

4.  The copyright holder failed to comply with formalities to acquire or maintain their copyright.

Today in most countries, there are no formal requirements to acquire or renew copyright protection over a work. This was not always the case, however, and many works have entered the public domain over the years because a creator failed to adhere to formalities.

What can you do with a work that is in the public domain?

You can do almost anything, but it depends on the scope and duration of copyright protection in the particular country where the work is used. Depending on the country, for example, a work in the public domain may still be covered by moral rights that last beyond the duration of copyright. It’s also possible that a work is in the public domain in one country, but is still under copyright in another country. This means you may not be able to use the work freely where copyright still applies.

A work that is in the public domain for purposes of copyright law may still be subject to other intellectual property restrictions. For example, a public domain story may have a trademarked brand on the cover associated with the publisher of the book. Trademark protection is independent of copyright protection, and may still exist even though the work is in the public domain as a matter of copyright. Also, once a creator uses a public domain work to turn it into a new work, the creator will have copyright on the portions of their new work that are original to them. As an example, the creator of a film adaptation based on a public domain novel will have copyright protection over the film but not the underlying public domain novel.

Author credit and the public domain

Even though it may not be legally required in every country, especially those countries where moral rights do not exist after the term of copyright expires, there are many benefits to identifying and giving credit to the original creator, even after her work has entered the public domain. Many communities have adopted norms, which are accepted standards for crediting the authors and the treatment of works in the public domain. Creative Commons has created public domain guidelines that can be used by communities to create their own norms. Review the CC guidelines here. Can you think of a reason why it might be helpful to give credit to an author whose work is in the public domain? Can you think of why norms should be encouraged when public domain works are reused?

Finding works in the public domain

With millions of creative works whose copyright has expired—and many more added regularly with tools like the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, the public domain is a vast treasure trove of content.

Some sites that host works in the public domain are Project Gutenberg, Public Domain Review,  Digital Public Library of America, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive, Library of Congress, Flickr, and the Rijksmuseum. The CC Search tool is another way to find public domain material.

It is not always easy to identify whether a work is in the public domain (though there are many resources available to help, such as this database of authors in Argentina). As we learned, copyright protection is automatic, so the absence of a copyright symbol “©” does not mean a work is in the public domain. In addition to its CC0 Public Domain Dedication for creators, Creative Commons also has a tool called the Public Domain Mark, designed to label works whose copyright has expired everywhere in the world, so that reusers can easily identify that those works are in the worldwide public domain. As of 2016, CC’s public domain tools were used on more than 90 million works.

Final remarks

A healthy public domain is crucial to preserving our cultural heritage, inspiring new generations of creators, and increasing human knowledge. Because the scope and duration of copyright has grown so much over the years, it can be easy to forget the public domain exists at all. But the public domain is a critical part of the bargain of copyright, and works in the public domain are incredible resources that belong to all of us.

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2.4 Exceptions and Limitations to Copyright

The limitations and exceptions built into copyright, including “fair use” and “fair dealing” in some parts of the world, were designed to ensure that the rights of the public were not unduly restricted by copyright.

The Big Question

What would the world look like if copyright did not have any limits to what it prevented you from doing with copyrighted work?

Imagine resorting to Google’s search engine on your laptop or smartphone to settle a disagreement with a friend about some bit of trivia. You type in your search query, and Google comes up empty. You then learn that a court has required Google to delete its entire web index because it never entered into copyright agreements with each individual author of each individual page on the web. By indexing a web page and showing the public a snippet of the contents in their search results, the court has declared that Google violates the copyrights of hundreds of millions of people, and can no longer show those search results.

Fortunately, thanks to exceptions and limitations built into copyright laws in much of the world, including the fair use doctrine under U.S. copyright law, this hypothetical is unlikely to become reality in many countries. This is one of many illustrations of why it is so important that copyright has built-in limitations and exceptions.

Learning Outcomes

- State what limitations and exceptions to copyright are and why they exist

- Name a few common exceptions and limitations to copyright

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

Have you ever made a copy of a creative work? Can you recall a time when you were studying and you included properly cited quotations in a research paper you wrote? Can you think of a way an exception or limitation to copyright has benefited you?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Copyright is not absolute. There are some uses of copyrighted works that do not require permission. These uses are limitations on the exclusive rights normally granted to copyright holders and are known as “exceptions and limitations” to copyright.

Fair use, fair dealing and other exceptions and limitations to copyright are an extremely important part of copyright design. Some countries afford exceptions and limitations to copyright, such as fair dealing, and other countries do not offer exceptions or limitations at all.[1] If your use of another’s copyrighted work is “fair” or falls within another exception or limitation to copyright, then you are not infringing the creator’s copyright.

When legislators created copyright protections, they realized that allowing copyright to restrict all uses of creative works could be highly problematic. For example, how could scholars or critics write about plays, books, movies, or other art without quoting from them? (It would be extremely difficult.) And would copyright holders be inclined to provide licenses or other permission to people whose reviews might be negative? (Probably not.)

For this and a range of other reasons, certain uses are explicitly carved out from copyright – including, in most parts of the world, uses for purposes of criticism, parody, access for the visually impaired, and more.

The Berne Convention first established the concept of “fair” use, by providing the following in Article 9 section 2. This is known as the “three-step” test, and has been adopted in some form in several other treaties.

It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of the Union to permit the reproduction of such works in certain special cases, provided that such reproduction does not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author. (emphasis supplied)

For more information about the scope and use of the three-step test, read this short primer published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Exceptions and limitations to copyright vary by country. There are global discussions around how to harmonize them. This WIPO study by Kenneth Crews compares the copyright exceptions and limitations for libraries in many countries around the world.

Generally speaking, there are two main ways in which limitations and exceptions are written into copyright law. The first is by listing specific activities that are excluded from the reach of copyright. For example, Japanese copyright law has a specific exemption allowing classroom broadcasts of copyrighted material. This approach has the benefit of providing clarity about precisely what uses by the public are allowed and not considered infringing. However, it can also be limiting because anything not specifically on the list of exceptions may be deemed restricted by copyright.

The other approach is to include flexible guidelines about what is allowed in the spirit of the three-step test described above. Courts then determine exactly what uses are allowed without the permission of the copyright holder. The downside to flexible guidelines is that they leave more room for uncertainty. This is the approach used in the United States with fair use, although U.S. copyright law also has some specific exceptions to copyright written into the law as well. In the United States, fair use is determined using a four-factor test, where a federal court judge considers: 1) the purpose and character of your use, 2) the nature of the copyrighted work, 3) the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and 4) the effect of the use upon the potential market.  See additional resources for a good selection of publications that discuss fair use and other exceptions and limitations to copyright.

Most countries also have compulsory licensing schemes, which are another form of limitation on the exclusive rights of copyright holders. These statutory systems make copyrighted content (for example, music) available for particular types of reuse without asking permission, but they require payment of specified (and non-negotiable) fees to the copyright owners. Compulsory licensing schemes permit anyone to make certain uses of copyrighted works so long as they pay a fee to the rights holder whose work will be used.

As an organization and as a movement, Creative Commons supports strong exceptions and limitations to copyright. The vision of Creative Commons—universal access to research and education and full participation in culture—will not be realized through licensing alone. CC supports a copyright system that appropriately balances the rights of creators and the rights of users and the general public.

Final remarks

Like the public domain, exceptions and limitations to copyright are just as important as the exclusive rights copyright grants. Think of them as a safety valve for the public in order to be able to utilize copyrighted works for particular uses in the public interest. Educate yourself about the exceptions and limitations that apply where you live, so you can take advantage of and advocate for these critical user rights.

1. The fair use doctrine is found in the United States, and the fair dealing doctrine is found in many other common law countries. Learn more about limitations and exceptions here http://www.wipo.int/copyright/en/limitations/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitations_and_exceptions_to_copyright. ↵

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Additional Resources

More information about copyright concepts

- Liability and remedies

- Generally, to establish a claim of copyright infringement, a creator or holder of copyright need only show that she has a valid copyright in the work and that the defendant copied protected expression from the work. However, the intention of the alleged infringer may be relevant in some cases, such as if the defendant asserts that an exception or limitation applied to their use or that their work was independently created.

- The copyright laws of some countries grant copyright holders statutory remedies for infringement. The type and amounts of remedies including damages are established by law. Be aware of the existence of statutory damages and other remedies permitted by applicable law, including statutory provisions that award legal fees in some circumstances.

- Licensing and transfer

- Many creators and copyright holders need help to fully exercise the exclusive rights or simply give others permission to exercise the right granted by copyright law. Several options exist to do so. Some creators choose to license some or all of those rights, either exclusively or non exclusively. Others choose to sell their rights outright and allow others to exercise them in their place, sometimes in exchange for royalty payments. There are often formalities associated with the sale or licensing of copyrights, including when a copyright license must be in writing depending on the copyright law that applies.

- Termination of copyright transfers and licenses

- The laws of some countries grant copyright holders the right to terminate transfer agreements or licenses even if the transfer agreement or license doesn’t allow it. In the United States, for example, copyright law provides two mechanisms for doing so depending on when the transfer agreement or license became effective. For more information on these rights and a tool that allows creators and copyright holders to figure out if they have those rights, visit https://rightsback.org.

- CopyrightX by Harvard Law School.

- A course on copyright provided by Harvard Law School’s HarvardX distance learning initiative

- http://copyx.org/

- http://online-learning.harvard.edu/course/copyrightx

- United States Copyright Office Circular #1, “Copyright Basics.”

- http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf

- Copyright for Educators & Librarians by Coursera

- A course on copyright provided by Coursera:

- https://www.coursera.org/learn/copyright-for-education

More information about limitations and exceptions to copyright

- Fair Use Evaluator:

- An online tool to help users understand how to determine the “fairness” of use under the U.S. Copyright Code, and work with materials under fair use. http://librarycopyright.net/resources/fairuse/index.php

- Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property by American University Washington College of Law. CC BY 3.0

- Publications on Fair Use to understand underlying principles and best practices

- http://pijip-impact.org/fairuse/publications

- Copyright and Exceptions by Kennisland. CC0 1.0 Public Domain Designation

- Interactive map of European copyright exceptions

- http://copyrightexceptions.eu

- A Fair(y) Use Tale by Eric Faden. CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

- A creative educational fair use mashup which ironically makes use of clips from Disney films as it explains how copyright works. The discussion of fair use begins around the 6 minute 30 second mark in the video.

- https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2007/03/fairy-use-tale

More information about the public domain

- Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States by Cornell University Library Copyright Information Center Copyright information on when resources fall into the public domain depending on the circumstances under which they were written http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm

- Out of Copyright: Determining the Copyright Status of Works
A website to help determine the copyright status of a work and whether it has fallen into the public domain
http://outofcopyright.eu/

- The Public Domain Manifesto by Communia. GNU General Public License
A website with information about the public domain, the values of some of its supporters,
And some recommendations on how to use the public domain
http://publicdomainmanifesto.org/manifesto.html

- Center for the Study of Public Domain by Duke Law School

- Information and events regarding the Public Domain
https://law.duke.edu/cspd/

- Bound by Law by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins. CC BY-NC-SA 2.5

- A comic about public domain

- https://law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/digital/

- Public Domain Review

- An online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.

- https://publicdomainreview.org/

- It’s Time to Protect the Public Domain by Wikimedia Foundation. CC BY 3.0

- Article providing information on some of the important details of of public domain, it’s legal backing, and the public interest.

- https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/06/30/time-to-protect-pd/

Participant Recommended Resources

CC Certificate participants’ recommended many additional resources through Hypothes.is annotations on the Certificate website. While Creative Commons has not vetted these resources, we wanted to highlight participant’s contributions here: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccerteducomments/chapter/additional-resources-2

III

Unit 3: Anatomy of a CC License

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3. Anatomy of a CC License

Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a clear, standardized way to grant permission to others to use their creative work. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license answers the question, “What can I do with this?” and provides freedom to reuse, subject to clearly defined conditions.

All Creative Commons licenses ensure that creators retain their copyright and get credit for their work, while permitting others to copy and distribute it. Although the tools are designed to be as easy to use as possible, there are still some things to learn in order to fully understand their mechanics.

The CC license unit has four sections:

3.1 License Design and Terminology

3.2 License Scope

3.3 License Types

3.4 License Enforceability

There are also additional resources if you are interested in learning more about any of the topics covered in this unit.

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3.1 License Design and Terminology

Do you “speak CC” yet? This lesson covers the acronyms, terms, and symbols used in connection with Creative Commons’ tools, as well as some key things to know about how the licenses were designed.

Learning Outcomes

- Differentiate the meaning of different CC icons

- Identify three layers of CC licenses

Big Question / Why It Matters

Given that most of us are not lawyers, what do we need to know about the legalities in order to use the CC licenses properly?

Creative Commons’ legal tools were designed to be as accessible to everyone as possible while still being legally robust. CC’s founders made several design decisions that make these legal tools relatively easy to use and understand.

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

Have you ever come across a CC licensed Flickr image that you really liked but were afraid to use because you weren’t sure of the legal terms and conditions? Have you ever been frustrated because you didn’t understand how to decide which of the CC legal tools to use for your own work?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Copyright operates by default under an “all rights reserved” approach. Creative Commons licenses function within copyright law, but they utilize a “some rights reserved” approach. While there are several different CC license options, all of them grant the public permission to use the works under certain standardized conditions. The licenses grant those permissions for as long as the underlying copyright lasts or until you violate the license terms. This is what we mean when we say CC licenses work on top of copyright, not instead of copyright.

The licenses were designed to be a free, voluntary solution for creators who want to grant the public up-front permissions to use their works. Although they are legally enforceable tools, they were designed in a way that was intended to make them accessible to non-lawyers.

The licenses are built using a three layer design.

1. The legal code is the base layer. This contains the “lawyer-readable” terms and conditions that are legally enforceable in court. Take a minute and scan through the legal code of CC BY to see how it is structured. Can you find where the attribution requirements are listed?

2. The commons deeds are the most well-known layer of the licenses. These are the web pages that lay out the key license terms in so-called “human-readable” terms. The deeds are not legally enforceable but instead summarize the legal code. Take some time to explore the deeds for CC BY and CC BY-NC-ND and identify how they differ. Can you find the links to the legal code from each deed?

3. The final layer of the license design recognizes that software plays a critical role in the creation, copying, discovery, and distribution of works. In order to make it easy for websites and web services to know when a work is available under a Creative Commons license, we provide a “machine readable” version of the license—a summary of the key freedoms granted and obligations imposed written into a format that applications, search engines, and other kinds of technology can understand. We developed a standardized way to describe licenses that software can understand called CC Rights Expression Language (CC REL) to accomplish this. When this metadata is attached to CC licensed works, someone searching for a CC licensed work using a search engine (e.g., Google advanced search) can more easily discover CC licensed works.

Example of “machine readable” code from Creative Commons Licence Chooser. CC BY 4.0

CC license basics

All Creative Commons licenses have many important features in common. At a minimum, every license helps creators (we call them “licensors” when they use CC tools) retain copyright while allowing others to copy and distribute their work. Every CC license also ensures licensors get credit for their work. CC licenses work around the world and last as long as applicable copyright lasts (because they are built on copyright) and as long as the user complies with the license. These common features serve as the baseline, on top of which licensors can choose to grant additional permissions when deciding how they want their work to be used.

Note for readers: Throughout all of the CC Certificate content, please assume all descriptions of the licenses refer to the most recent version of the CC license suite, Version 4.0, unless otherwise noted. You will learn more about the different versions in Section 3.4.

Choices for the Licensor

All Creative Commons licenses are structured to give the user permission to make a wide range of uses as long as the user complies with the conditions in the license. The basic condition in all of the licenses is that the user provides credit to the licensor and certain other information, such as where the original work may be found.

A CC licensor makes a few simple decisions on the path to choosing a license– first, do I want to allow commercial use, and second, do I want to allow derivative works (also known as adaptations)? We’ll address how to do that in a later section.

If a licensor decides to allow derivative works, she may also choose to require that anyone who uses the work—we call them licensees—make their new work available under the same license terms. This is what is meant by “ShareAlike” and it is one of the mechanisms that helps the digital commons of CC licensed content grow over time. ShareAlike is inspired by the GNU General Public License, used by many free and open source software projects.

These different license elements are symbolized by visual icons.

This symbol means Attribution or “BY.” All of the licenses include this condition.

This symbol means NonCommercial or “NC,” which means the work is only available to be used for noncommercial purposes. Three of the CC licenses include this restriction.

This symbol means ShareAlike or “SA,” which means that adaptations based on this work must be licensed under the same license. Two of the CC licenses include this condition.

This symbol means NoDerivatives or “ND,” which means reusers cannot share adaptations of the work. Two of the CC licenses include this restriction.

When combined, these icons represent the six CC license options. The icons are also embedded in the “license buttons,” which each represent a particular CC license type. Section 3.3 explores the combinations in detail.

Public domain tools

In addition to the CC license suite, CC also has two public domain tools represented by the icons below. These public domain tools are not licenses:

CC0 enables creators to dedicate their works to the worldwide public domain to the greatest extent possible. Note that some jurisdictions do not allow creators to dedicate their works to the public domain, so CC0 has other legal mechanisms included to help deal with this situation where it applies. (More on this in Section 3.3.)

The Public Domain Mark is a label used to mark works known to be free of all copyright restrictions. Unlike CC0, the Public Domain Mark is not a legal tool and has no legal effect when applied to a work. It serves only as a label to inform the public about the public domain status of a work and is often used by museums and archives working with very old works.

Final remarks

There is a learning curve to some of the terminology and basics about how CC legal tools work. But as you now know, it is far less intimidating than it looks! Now that you understand how to “speak CC” and know some of the fundamentals about CC license design, you are well on your way to becoming versed in CC licensing.

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3.2 License Scope

Creative Commons licenses are built on copyright law. That simple fact tells you most of what you need to know about when they do and do not apply, and how long they last.

Learning Outcomes

- Understand how CC works with copyright and why this is important

- Explain time length of license

Big Question / Why It Matters

What is the legal foundation upon which Creative Commons licenses operate? Why is it so important?

Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses. They apply where and when copyright applies. This reflects a fundamental design decision by the founders of Creative Commons. Given that the goal was to make more creative and educational works available under common-sense terms, CC wanted to ensure its licenses were not used to restrict works or uses of works that copyright does not restrict. This is a core CC value. Having the language of the licenses track copyright law accomplished this goal.

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

Do you understand why having CC licenses track copyright was an important decision for the founders of CC? Think about what it would mean if a CC license could prevent you from doing something you could otherwise do with a copyrighted work, such as printing a copy of a poem to insert in a birthday card for a friend.

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

The statement that “Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses” tells you the following about the licenses:

1. the licenses “operate” or apply only when the work is within the scope of copyright law (or other related law) and the restrictions of copyright law apply to the intended use of the work (this is discussed in more detail below),

2. certain other rights, such as patents, trademarks, privacy and publicity rights, are not covered by the licenses and must be managed separately.

The first explains a basic limitation of the licenses in controlling what people do with the work, and the second provides a warning that there may be other rights at play with the work that restrict how it is used.

➡ Let’s start by unpacking what it means for the license to apply where copyright applies.

Creative Commons licenses are appropriate for creators who want to provide people with one or more of the permissions governed by copyright law. For example, if you want to give others permissions to freely copy and redistribute your work, you can use a Creative Commons license to grant them that permission. Likewise, if you want to give others permission to freely transform, alter, or otherwise create derivative works based on your work, you can use a Creative Commons license to grant them that permission.

However, you don’t need to use a Creative Commons license to give someone permission to read your article or watch your video, because reading and watching aren’t activities that copyright generally regulates.

Here are two more important scenarios in which copyright does not apply:

- When fair use, fair dealing, or some other limitation and exception to copyright applies; see relevant FAQ here.

- When the work is in the public domain; see relevant FAQ here.[1]

➡ Because copyright does not apply in those scenarios, CC licenses don’t either.

Can you think of reasons why someone might try to apply a CC license to a work not covered by copyright in their own country? Or reasons why a CC licensor might expect attribution every time their work is used, even for a use that is not prohibited by copyright law?

They might be trying to exert control they do not actually have by law. But more likely than not, they simply do not know that copyright does not apply or that a work is in the public domain. Or, for the savvy licensor, they may realize their work is in the public domain in some countries but not public domain everywhere, and they want to be sure everyone everywhere is able to reuse it.

For a real-life example, let’s look at what happens when you want to use Creative Commons licenses in a field like 3D printing. Glance through this Public Knowledge resource about how to apply a CC license in the 3D printing field. It is easy to see how complicated the legal issues can become, particularly in newly emerging fields like this one.

One other subtle but important difference about the scope of CC licenses is that they also cover other rights closely related to copyright. Defined as “Similar Rights” in the CC license legal code, these include related and neighboring rights and sui generis database rights, which are rights in some countries restricting the extraction and reuse of the contents of a database. See Section 2.1 for a refresher on what Similar Rights covers. Just as with copyright, the CC license conditions only come into play when Similar Rights otherwise apply to the work and to the particular reuse made by someone using the CC licensed work.

➡The other critical part of the statement “CC licenses are copyright licenses” is that there may be other rights in the works upon which the license has no effect—for example, privacy rights. Again, CC licenses do not have any effect on rights beyond copyright and Similar Rights as defined in the licenses, so other rights have to be managed separately. Read the FAQ about this issue here.

While not required, Creative Commons urges creators to make sure there are no other rights that may prevent reuse of the work as intended. CC licensors do not make any warranties about reuse of the work. That means that unless the licensor is offering a separate warranty, it is incumbent on the reuser to determine whether other rights may impact their intended reuse of the work. Learning more can sometimes be as easy as contacting the licensor to inquire about these possible other rights. Read through this complete list of considerations for reusers of CC-licensed works.

What types of content can be CC-licensed?

You can apply a CC license to anything protected by copyright that you own, with one important exception.

CC urges creators not to apply CC licenses to software. This is because there are many free and open source software licenses that do that job better; they were built specifically as software licenses. For example, most open source software licenses include provisions about distributing the software’s source code—the CC licenses do not address that important aspect of sharing software. The software sharing ecosystem is well-established, and there are many good open source software licenses to choose from. This FAQ from CC’s website has more information about why we discourage our licenses for software.

Whose rights are covered by the CC license?

A CC license on a given work only covers the copyright held by the person who applied the license—the licensor. That might sound obvious, but it is an important point to understand. For example, many employers own the copyright to works created by employees, so if an employee applies a CC license to a work owned by her employer, she is not able to give any permission whatsoever to reuse the work.

Additionally, a work may incorporate the copyrighted work of another, such as a scholarly article that uses a copyrighted photograph to illustrate an idea (after having received the permission of the owner of the photograph to include it). The CC license applied by the author of the scholarly article does not apply to the photograph, only the remainder of the work. Separate permission may need to be obtained in order to reproduce the photograph (not the remainder of the article). See Section 4.1 for more details on how to handle these situations.

Also, works often have more than one copyright attached to them. For example, a filmmaker may own the copyright to a film adaptation of a book, but the book author also holds a copyright to the book on which the film is based. In this example, if the film is CC-licensed, the CC license only applies to the film and not the book.

Final remarks

A key to understanding how Creative Commons works is understanding that the licenses depend on copyright to function. This seemingly simple concept explains a lot about when the tools apply and how much of a work they cover.

1. Remember that the term of copyright for works varies around the world. So, in some situations, a work may be in the public domain under the laws of Germany but not in the public domain under the laws of Canada. This means that depending on the law that applies to your use (generally, where you are when using the work), the CC license may or may not apply. ↵

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3.3 License Types

There are six different CC licenses, designed to help accommodate the diverse needs of creators while still using simple, standardized terms.

Learning Outcomes

- Explain the CC license suite

- Describe the different CC license elements

Big Question / Why It Matters

Why are there so many different Creative Commons licenses?

There is no single Creative Commons license. The CC license suite (which includes the six CC licenses) and the CC0 public domain dedication offer creators a range of options. At first, all of these choices can appear daunting. But when you dig into the options, you will realize the spectrum of choices is fairly simple.

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

Think about a piece of creative or academic work you made that you are particularly proud of. If you shared that work with others, would you have been okay with them adapting it or using it for commercial purposes? Why or why not?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Creative Commons licenses are standardized tools, but part of the vision is to provide a range of options for creators who are interested in sharing their works with the public rather than reserving all rights under copyright.

The four license elements—BY, SA, NC, and ND—combine to make up six different license options.

All of the licenses include the BY condition. In other words, all of the licenses require that the creator be attributed in connection with their work. Beyond that commonality, the licenses vary whether (1) commercial use of the work is permitted; and (2) whether the work can be adapted, and if so, on what terms.

The six licenses, from least to most restrictive in terms of the freedoms granted reusers, are:

The Attribution license or “CC BY” allows people to use the work for any purpose (even commercially and even in modified form) as long as they give attribution to the creator.

The Attribution-ShareAlike license or “BY-SA” allows people to use the work for any purpose (even commercially and even in modified form), as long as they give attribution to the creator and make any adaptations they share with others available under the same or a compatible license. This is CC’s version of a copyleft license, and is the license required for content uploaded to Wikipedia, for example.

The Attribution-NonCommercial license or “BY-NC” allows people to use the work for noncommercial purposes only, and only as long as they give attribution to the creator.

The Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license or “BY-NC-SA” allows people to use the work for noncommercial purposes only, and only as long as they give attribution to the creator and make any adaptations they share with others available under the same or a compatible license.

The Attribution-NoDerivatives license or “BY-ND” allows people to use the unadapted work for any purpose (even commercially), as long as they give attribution to the creator.

The Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license or “BY-NC-ND” is the most restrictive license offered by CC. It allows people to use the unadapted work for noncommercial purposes only, and only as long as they give attribution to the licensor.

To really understand how the different license options work, let’s dig into the different license elements. Attribution is a part of all CC licenses, and we will dissect exactly what type of attribution is required in a later unit. For now, let’s focus on what makes the licenses different.

1. Commercial vs. noncommercial use.

NonCommercial (“NC”) As we know, three of the licenses (BY-NC, BY-NC-SA, and BY-NC-ND) limit reuse of the work to noncommercial purposes only. In the legal code, a noncommercial purpose is defined as one that is “not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.” This is intended to provide flexibility depending on the facts surrounding the reuse, without over specifying exact situations that could exclude some prohibited and some permitted reuses.

It’s important to note that CC’s definition of NC depends on the use, not the user. If you are a nonprofit or charitable organization, your use of an NC-licensed work could still run afoul of the NC restriction, and if you are a for-profit entity, your use of an NC-licensed work does not necessarily mean you have violated the term. For example, a nonprofit entity cannot sell another’s NC licensed work for a profit, and a for-profit may use an NC licensed work for non commercial purposes. Whether a use is commercial depends on the specifics of the situation. See our CC NonCommercial Interpretation page here for more information and examples.

2. Adaptations

The other differences between the licenses hinge on whether, and on what terms, reusers can adapt and then share the licensed work. The question of what constitutes an adaptation of a licensed work depends on applicable copyright law (for a reminder, see Unit 2). One of the exclusive rights granted to creators under copyright is the right to create adaptations of their works or, as they are called in some places, derivative works. (For example, creating a movie based on a book, or translating a book from one language to another.)

As a legal matter, at times it is tricky to determine exactly what is and is not an adaptation. Here are some handy rules about the licenses to keep in mind:

- Technical format-shifting (for example, converting a licensed work from a digital format to a physical copy) is not an adaptation regardless of what applicable copyright law may otherwise provide.

- Fixing minor problems with spelling or punctuation is not an adaptation.

- Syncing a musical work with a moving image is an adaptation regardless of what applicable copyright law may otherwise provide.

- Reproducing and putting works together into a collection is not an adaptation of the individual works. For example, combining stand-alone essays by several authors into an essay collection for use as an open textbook is a collection and not an adaptation. Most opencourseware is a collection of others’ open educational resources (OER).

- Including an image in connection with text, as in a blog post, a powerpoint, or an article, does not create an adaptation unless the photo itself is adapted.

NoDerivatives Two of the licenses (BY-ND and BY-NC-ND) prohibit reusers from sharing (i.e. distributing or making available) adaptations of the licensed work. To be clear, this means anyone may create adaptations of works under an ND license so long as they do not share the work with others in adapted form. This allows, among other things, organizations to engage in text and data mining without violating the ND term.

ShareAlike Two of the licenses (BY-SA and BY-NC-SA) require that if adaptations of the licensed work are shared, they must be made available under the same or a compatible license. For ShareAlike purposes, the list of compatible licenses is short. It includes later versions of the same license (e.g., BY-SA 4.0 is compatible with BY-SA 3.0) and a few non-CC licenses designated as compatible by Creative Commons (e.g., the Free Art License). You can read more about this here, but the most important thing to remember is that ShareAlike requires that if you share your adaptation, you must do so using the same or a compatible license.

Public domain

In addition to the CC license suite, Creative Commons also has an option for creators who want to take a “no rights reserved” approach and disclaim copyright entirely. This is CC0, the public domain dedication tool.

Like the CC licenses, CC0 (read “CC Zero”) uses the three-layer design—legal code, deed, and metadata.

The CC0 legal code also uses a three-pronged legal approach. Some countries do not allow creators to dedicate their work to the public domain through a waiver or abandonment of those rights, so CC0 includes a “fall back” license that allows anyone in the world to do anything with the work unconditionally. The fall back license comes into play when the waiver fails for any reason. And finally, in the rare instance that both the waiver and the “fall back” license are not enforceable, CC includes a promise by the person applying CC0 to their work that they will not assert copyright against reusers in a manner that interferes with their stated intention of surrendering all rights in the work.

Like the licenses, CC0 is a copyright tool, but it also covers a few additional rights beyond those covered by the CC licenses, such a non competition laws. From a reuse perspective, there still may be other rights that require clearance separately, such as trademark and patent rights, and third party rights in the work, such as publicity or privacy rights.

Final remarks

Creative Commons legal tools were designed to provide a solution to complicated laws in a standardized way, making them as easy as possible for non-lawyers to use and apply. Understanding the basic legal principles in this Unit will help you use the CC licenses and public domain tools more effectively.

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3.4 License Enforceability

Creative Commons licenses were carefully crafted to make them legally enforceable in countries around the world.

Law Library Stacks photo (cropped from original) from Unsplash by Malte Baumann/ CC0

Learning Outcomes

- Describe the state of Creative Commons case law

- Explain the potential benefit of seeking non-legal resolutions to disagreements

Big Question / Why It Matters

Creative Commons licenses are legal tools that build on copyright law. As legal instruments, CC licenses need to stand up in court. What happens when there is a court case that involves Creative Commons licenses? What happens if someone is violating the CC license you applied to a work, but you do not want to file a lawsuit? What happens if a licensor complains about how you have attributed them when reusing their work?

To date and to our knowledge, no court around the world that has heard a case involving a CC license (of which there have been very few) has questioned the validity or enforceability of a CC license. Thanks to the CC community, most disputes connected to CC licenses are resolved outside of court and often without involving lawyers.

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters To You

Whether you or your organization is using CC licenses, or you are advising others in the use of CC licenses, you want to be confident that the terms of the CC licenses are enforceable. If someone misuses your work, what recourse do you have? What would you do if you found out someone was using your CC licensed photograph in a magazine without giving you credit, for example?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Most people who reuse CC licensed works try to comply with the license conditions. But whether well meaning or not, sometimes people get it wrong.

If someone is using a CC licensed work without giving attribution or otherwise following the license, their right to use the work ends automatically as soon as they violate the license terms. Unless the person using the work received separate permission or is relying upon fair use or some other exception to copyright, they are potentially liable for copyright infringement. Read this FAQ about what happens when someone does not comply with a CC license. Read this FAQ for a look at what happens from the perspective of a reuser.

Note this important difference between the newest version of CC licenses (version 4.0) and prior versions:

From the What’s New in 4.0 page on the CC web site. CC BY 4.0

Under version 4, users of CC-licensed works who come into compliance with license terms within 30 days of discovering they were in violation of the terms have their rights under the license automatically reinstated.

Sometimes these types of disputes can end up in court. Over the course of CC’s history, to our knowledge, there have been very few legal disputes and decisions involving CC legal tools. Each court that has rendered a decision has made it without questioning the enforceability of the CC license at issue.

Those judicial decisions have been in a variety of places around the world, including Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Israel, and the United States. Creative Commons maintains a listing of court decisions and case law from jurisdictions around the world on its wiki here.

In all of these decisions, no court has questioned the validity of the CC license in the case. While the CC license played a minor role in some of the cases, in others the court has held the defendant liable for copyright infringement for failing to follow the CC license terms. Read about one such decision in this summary.

Legal enforceability is one of the key features of CC licensing. While the licenses are widely seen as symbols of free and open sharing, they also carry legal weight. The legal code was written by lawyers with the help of a global network of international copyright experts. The result is a set of terms and conditions that are intended to operate and be enforceable everywhere in the world.

License Versions

As noted above, there are different versions of CC licenses. Not to be confused with the different types of licenses described in Section 3.3, the license version number simply represents when that particular version of the legal code was written. CC improves its licenses through the process of versioning, which is the process by which we update the legal code to better account for changes in copyright law and technology, and the needs of reusers. While there are some differences between license versions, the different versions are largely the same in practical effect. The latest version of the CC license suite is Version 4.0, which was published in 2013. Details on what updates were made to the licenses in Version 4.0 can be found on the CC wiki.  For the most definitive and comprehensive view of how the licenses have changed from Version 1.0 to the present, including all changes to the attribution and marking requirements, visit our website.

In all cases, we recommend that creators use the latest version of the licenses, as it reflects the latest thinking of Creative Commons and its global network of legal experts.

Official translations of CC legal tools

The latest versions of all CC legal tools may be translated into official versions in other languages. Creative Commons has a formal process by which this is done in order to ensure that the translations are as close to the original as possible. Our goal is to get the legal tools into as many languages as possible, so that everyone can read and understand the terms in their native language(s). The official translations are noted at the bottom of the legal code on all of the licenses, and are equivalents of one another.

Many people ask about the relationship between the official translations and the English originals. All official translations are linguistic translations only, unlike porting (described below). All the official translations are legal equivalents of one another, which means that while the licensor may have gone through the English language version of the chooser to apply a CC BY license to her work, a reuser of that work who speaks Arabic may view that very same license in Arabic. This is similar to how standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium translate a single standard into many different languages, and how the United Nations publishes treaties.

Distinguishing ported versions of the pre-4.0 versions of the CC licenses

Prior to the publication of Version 4.0 in November 2013, Creative Commons gave permission to the CC Global Network to “port” the Creative Commons licenses. Porting involved linguistic translation and adjustments so that the licenses reflected local terminology and drafting protocols, and accounted for other local differences, such as the existence of moral rights and collecting societies.

One of the primary reasons for versioning the licenses from 3.0 to 4.0 was to eliminate the need for porting, an unnecessarily complex process that could be eliminated if CC took proper care to ensure the new licenses were internationalized. Starting with Version 4.0, the most recent version of the CC license suite, CC no longer “ports” the licenses. The ported licenses of previous versions may still be used and remain legally valid and enforceable; however, Creative Commons discourages their use and recommends Version 4.0 as the latest and most up-to-date thinking of CC and its global network.

Resolving disputes

Since the publication of Version 1.0 of the licenses in 2002, Creative Commons is not aware of a large number of disputes between licensors and reusers over its licenses, including the NonCommercial term and attribution.

There may be several explanations for this. As observed by Creative Commons in its Defining NonCommercial Study, expectations of licensors and reusers of CC licensed content may play a factor. For example, NC licensors often intend for broad reuse of their NC licensed content, as long as it is not reused primarily for commercial gain. However, reusers of NC licensed content may assume more conservative license terms around commercial reuse. As a result, NC licensed content is not often reused to the full permissions the license affords or the licensor intends. Often when disputes around CC licensed content do arise, they are resolved amicably and out of court, frequently without involving lawyers. Instead, disputes are resolved through outreach by the licensor to the user, and an accord struck to fix any actual problem.

Note that we accounted for this practice in Version 4.0. Whereas prior to 4.0, any violation of the license automatically terminated the license, and the violator had to seek new and express permission from the licensor to reuse the work again. In Version 4.0, the license automatically reinstates if the violator corrects the problem within 30 days of having become aware of it. This encourages reusers to do the right thing—correct violations as soon as possible upon discovery,  whether or not the licensor has made a claim. This can help avoid disputes.

In many ways, both of these practices—being more generous and respectful, and outreach to solve any perceived violations—are a testament to the values held and practiced by the CC community of creators and reusers. Creative Commons encourages healthy, open interactions between licensors and those reusing their works.

Final remarks

The legal robustness of the CC licenses is critically important. With the help of its international network of legal and policy experts, the CC licenses are accepted and enforceable worldwide.  To date, no court has declared the licenses unenforceable, and very few lawsuits have ensued. In the vast majority of cases, the community resolves disputes outside of the courtroom.

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Additional Resources

- About the Open Publication License by David Wiley. CC BY 4.0

- A brief history outlining open content licensing and why the licenses were eventually

- replaced by the more robust Creative Commons licenses

- http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/329

- Creative Commons Licenses. CC BY-SA 3.0

- Wikipedia article outlining the licenses and some use instructions

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license

- About the Licenses by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0

- To read all of the license deeds, or legal codes, visit this site and explore the different licenses.

- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

- 3 Steps for Licensing Your 3d Printed Stuff by Michael Weinberg. CC BY-SA 3.0

- A set of instructions for how to license 3d printed materials

- https://www.publicknowledge.org/assets/uploads/documents/3_Steps_for_Licensing_Your_3D_Printed_Stuff.pdf

- Selected Frequently Asked Questions by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0

- Do Creative Commons licenses affect exceptions and limitations to copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use?https://creativecommons.org/faq/#do-creative-commons-licenses-affect-exceptions-and-limitations-to-copyright-such-as-fair-dealing-and-fair-use

- May I apply a Creative Commons license to a work in the public domain? https://creativecommons.org/faq/#may-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-a-work-in-the-public-domain

- What happens if I offer my material under a Creative Commons license and someone misuses them? https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-happens-if-i-offer-my-material-under-a-creative-commons-license-and-someone-misuses-them

- How can I lose my rights under a Creative Commons license? If that happens, how do I get them back? https://creativecommons.org/faq/#how-can-i-lose-my-rights-under-a-creative-commons-license-if-that-happens-how-do-i-get-them-back

Participant Recommended Resources

CC Certificate participants’ recommended many additional resources through Hypothes.is annotations on the Certificate website. While Creative Commons has not vetted these resources, we wanted to highlight participant’s contributions here: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccerteducomments/chapter/additional-resources-3/

IV

Unit 4: Using CC Licenses and CC-Licensed Works

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4. Using CC Licenses and CC Licensed Works

Now that you know how the licenses work and how they are designed, you are ready to use CC licenses and CC0 for your own work and reuse CC-licensed works created by others.

This unit covers what you need to know as a CC licensor and as a reuser. When your own CC-licensed work incorporates CC-licensed work made by others, you are both!

This unit has four sections:

4.1 Choosing and Applying a CC License
4.2 Things to Consider after CC-Licensing
4.3 Finding and Reusing CC-Licensed Work
4.4 Remixing CC-Licensed Work

There are also additional resources if you are interested in learning more about any of the topics covered in this unit.

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4.1 Choosing and Applying a CC License

The act of applying a CC license is easy, but there are several important considerations to think through before you do.

CC BY License Button. Trademark: Creative Commons.

Learning Outcomes

- Name the most important considerations before applying a CC license or CC0

- Apply a license using CC’s License Chooser and CC0 using CC’s Public Domain Dedication

- Evaluate which license to apply based on relevant factors

Big Question / Why It Matters

What should creators consider before applying a CC license or CC0 to their work? There are several options for creators who choose to share using CC. There are also many things to think about before applying any CC license or CC0, including whether you have all the rights you need and if not, how you must indicate that to the public.

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

How would you go about choosing a particular CC license for your work? Do you know how to go about actually attaching a license to your work once you have chosen one? What if you change your mind about the license?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Before you decide that you want to apply a Creative Commons license or CC0 to your creative work, there are some important things to consider:

The licenses and CC0 are irrevocable. Irrevocable means a legal agreement that cannot be canceled. That means once you apply a CC license to a work, the CC license applies to the work until the copyright on the work expires. This aspect of CC licensing is highly desirable from the perspective of reusers because they have confidence knowing the creator can’t arbitrarily pull back the rights granted them under the CC license.

Because the licenses are irrevocable, it is very important to carefully consider the options before deciding to use a CC license on a work.

You must own or control copyright in the work. You should control copyright in the work to which you apply the license. For example, you don’t own or control any copyright in a work that is in the public domain, and you don’t own or control the copyright to an Enrique Iglesias song. Further, if you created the material in the scope of your employment, you may not be the holder of the rights and may need to get permission from your employer before applying a CC license. Before licensing, be mindful about whether you have copyright to the work to which you’re applying a CC license.

Which Creative Commons licence should I use?

The six Creative Commons licenses provide a range of options for creators who want to share their work with the public while still retaining copyright. The best way to decide which license is appropriate for you is to think about why you want to share and how you hope others will use your work.

For example, here are a few questions to consider:

- Do you think people might make interesting new works out of your creation? Do you want to give people the ability to translate your writing into different languages, or otherwise customize it for their own needs? If so, then you should choose a license that allows your work to be adapted.

- Is it important to you that your images are able to be incorporated into Wikipedia? If so, then you should choose CC BY, BY-SA, or CC0, because Wikipedia does not allow images licensed under any of the NonCommercial or NoDerivatives licenses except in limited circumstances.

- Do you want to give away all of your rights in your work so that it can be used by anyone in the world for any purpose? Then you might want to think about using the public domain dedication tool, CC0.

If you need some help deciding which license might be best for you, this flowchart from CC Australia might be useful (please note the information it contains is not legal advice and was created before CC offered 4.0 licenses): http://creativecommons.org.au/learn/fact-sheets/licensing-flowchart/

Which Creative Commons license is right for me by CC Australia. CC BY

How do I apply a CC license to my work?

Once you’ve decided you want to use a CC license and know which license you want to use, applying it is simple. Technically, all you have to do is indicate which CC license you are applying to your work. However, we strongly recommend including a link (or writing out the CC licence URL, if you are working offline) to the relevant CC license deed (e.g., https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). You can do this in the copyright notice for your work, on the footer of your website, or any other place that makes sense in light of the particular format and medium of your work. The important thing is to make it clear what the CC license covers and locate the notice in a place that makes that clear to the public. See Marking your work with a CC license for more information.

Indicating which CC license you choose can be as simple as this notice from the footer of BC Open Textbooks.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

If you are on a platform like Medium or Flickr, you should use the built-in CC licence tools on the platform to mark your work with the CC license you choose.

If you have a personal blog or a website, we recommend using the CC license chooser to generate code that identifies your chosen license. That code can be copied and inserted into your work online.

Take some time to play around with the CC license chooser now. After you select the boxes that indicate your preferences, the chooser generates the appropriate license based on your selections. Remember, the license chooser is not a registration page, it simply provides you with standardized HTML code, icons and license statements.

Do you see the text and icon just above the code? That text / links can also be copied and pasted onto your work to mark the work with a CC license.

How to apply CC0
Like the licenses, CC0 has its own chooser. If you want to dedicate your work to the public domain, you can go to https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/waiver. Complete the required fields, agree to the terms, and then get the metadata to mark your work with CC0.

If you want to mark the work in a different way or need to use a different format like closing titles in a video, you can visit https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads/ and access downloadable versions of all of the CC icons.

Whatever method you use to mark your content, there are several important steps for proper CC license marking. Here are three cases in which you will mark CC licensed works:

1. Marking your own work so that others can easily discover, reuse it and give you credit / attribution. The best practice for marking your work is to follow the TASL approach for your own portions of the content, and for the portions of the content created by others:

- T = Title

- A = Author (tell reusers who to give credit to)

- S = Source (give reusers a link to the resource)

- L = License (link to the CC licence deed)

When providing attribution, the goal is to mark the work with full TASL information. When you don’t have some of the TASL information about a work, do the best you can and include as much detail as possible in the marking statement.

Note, that starting with Version 4.0 the licenses no longer require a reuser to include the title as part of the attribution statement. However, if the title is provided, then CC encourages you to include it when attributing the author.

For more examples of how to mark your own work in different contexts, spend some time looking through CC’s extensive marking page.

See below for an example of marking an image with TASL information. The following image is a good example of CC marking because TASL with all appropriate links is provided in the attribution statement.

Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco by tvol. CC BY 2.0

2. Indicating if your work is based on someone else’s work – If your work is a modification or adaptation of another work, indicate this and provide attribution to the creator of the original work. You should also include a link to the work you modified and indicate what license applies to that work.

Example here:

This work, “90fied”, is a derivative of “Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco” by tvol, used under CC BY. “90fied” is licensed under CC BY by [Your name here].

3. Marking work created by others that you are incorporating into your own work

Example here from a Saylor Academy course:

In every case, the goals are the same: you want to make it easy for others to know who created what parts of the work. (1) Identify the terms under which any given work, or part of a work, can be used. (2) Provide information about works you used to create your new work or incorporated into your work.

Final remarks

When applying a CC license to a work: 1) Use the CC license chooser to determine which CC license best meets your needs. Apply the license code if possible, or copy / paste the text and links provided. 2) If you are using an online platform, use the built-in CC license tools to mark your work with a CC license. 3) Mark your work and give proper attribution to others’ works using the TASL approach.

There is no single answer for which CC license is the best. It is important to remember why you are sharing and what you hope others might do with your work, before making your CC license choice.

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4.2 Things to Consider after CC Licensing

Applying a CC license alone is not enough to ensure your work is freely available for easy reuse and remix.

Censorship Limitations by stevenpb dedicated to the public domain using CC0.

Learning Outcomes

- Explain why CC discourages changing the license terms

- Explain how a paywall affects CC-licensed content

- Describe why the technical format of content is significant

- Describe what happens when someone changes their mind about CC licensing

Big Question / Why It Matters

One of the most important aspects of Creative Commons licenses is that they are standardized. This makes it much easier for the public to understand how the licenses work and what reusers have to do to meet their obligations.

But CC licenses do not apply to works in a vacuum. CC licensed works usually live on websites that have their own terms of service. Sometimes, they are not in formats that make it easy to reuse or adapt them. And the works are often available in hard copy form for a price.

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

Have you ever found a CC-licensed work that you weren’t easily able to copy and share? What made it hard to reuse as intended? Was it an issue of format, or were there access restrictions on the work, or something else?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Creative Commons licenses are standardized licenses, which means the terms and conditions are the same for all works subject to the same type of CC license. This is an essential feature of their design, enabling the public to remix CC licensed works. It also makes the licenses easy to understand.

But people and institutions who use the licenses have diverse needs and wants. Sometimes creators want slightly different terms rather than the standard terms CC licenses offer.

We strongly discourage people from customizing open copyright licenses because this creates confusion, requires users to take the time to learn about how the custom license differs, and eliminates the benefits of standardization. If you change any of the terms and conditions of a CC license, you cannot call it a Creative Commons license or otherwise use the CC trademarks. This rule also applies if you try to add restrictions on what people can do with CC licensed work through your separate agreements, such as website terms of service. For example, your website’s terms of service can’t tell people they can’t copy a CC licensed work (if they are complying with the license terms). You can, however, make your CC licensed work available on more permissive terms and still call it a CC license. For example, you may waive your right to receive attribution.

Creative Commons has a detailed legal policy outlining these rules, but the best way to apply them is to ask yourself: is what you want to do going to make it easier or harder for people to use your CC licensed work? If the latter, then generally it’s a restriction and you can’t do it unless you remove the Creative Commons name from the work.

Note that all of the above applies to creators of CC licensed work. You can never change the legal terms that apply to someone else’s CC licensed work.

Charging for a CC licensed work

The first part of this lesson dealt with the requirements connected to changing the legal terms on a CC licensed work, whether by actually changing the license terms or using separate contracts to try to do so.

But what if you simply want to sell a CC licensed work?

If you are the creator, then selling your work is always okay. In fact, selling physical copies (e.g., a textbook) and providing the digital copies for free is a very common method for making money while using CC licenses.

Here is a prominent example from CC’s Team Open feature: Max Temkin, founder of Cards Against Humanity:

Stack of Cards Against Humanity packs by jareed. CC BY 2.0.

Charging for access to digital copies of a CC licensed work is more difficult. It is permissible, but once someone pays for a copy of your work, she can legally distribute it to others for free under the terms of the applicable CC license.

If you are charging for access to someone else’s CC licensed work—whether a physical copy or digital version—you have to pay attention to the particular CC license applied to the work. If the CC license includes the NonCommercial (NC) restriction, then you cannot charge the public to access the work.

Making your work accessible

Formats: Simply applying a CC license to a creative work does not necessarily make it easy for others to reuse and remix it. Think about what technical format you are using for your content (e.g., PDF? MP3?). Can people download your work? Can they easily edit or remix it if the license allows? In addition to the final polished version, many creators distribute editable source files of their content to make it easier for those who want to use the work for their own purposes. For example, in addition to the physical book or ebook, you might want to distribute files of a CC licensed book that enable people to easily cut and paste the content into their own works.

DRM: Using a distribution platform that applies digital rights management (DRM) (such as copy protection technology) to your work is another way you can inadvertently make it very hard for reusers to make use of the permissions in the CC license. If you have to upload your CC licensed works to a platform that uses DRM, consider also distributing the same content on sites that do not use DRM.

Note that the CC licenses prohibit you from applying DRM to someone else’s CC licensed work without their permission.

What if you change your mind about the CC license?

Inevitably, there are creators who apply a CC license to a work and then later decide they want to offer it on different terms. Even though the original license cannot be revoked, the creator is free to also offer the work under a different license. Similarly, the creator is free to remove the copy of the work they placed online.

In those cases, anyone who finds the work under the original license is legally permitted to use it under those terms until the copyright expires. As a practical matter, reusers may want to comply with the creator’s new wishes as a matter of respect.

What if someone does something with my CC licensed work I don’t like?

As long as users abide by license terms and conditions, authors / licensors cannot control how their material is used. That said, all CC licenses provide several mechanisms that allow licensors to choose not to be associated with their material, or to uses of their material with which they disagree.

- First, all CC licenses prohibit using the attribution requirement to suggest that the licensor endorses or supports a particular use.

- Second, licensors may waive the attribution requirement, choosing not to be identified as the licensor, if they wish.

- Third, if the licensor does not like how the material has been modified or used, CC licenses require that the licensee remove the attribution information upon request. (In 3.0 and earlier, this is only a requirement for adaptations and collections; in 4.0, this also applies to the unmodified work.)

- Finally, anyone modifying licensed material must indicate that the original has been modified. This ensures that changes made to the original material–whether or not the licensor approves of them–are not attributed back to the licensor.

- Further, it is important to remember:

- The Commons is full of good people who want to do the right thing, so we don’t often see much “abuse” of openly licensed works. Using CC licenses gives good, responsible people the freedom to use and build on your work.

- Copyright and/or open copyright licenses doesn’t keep “bad” people from doing “bad” things with your work if they don’t care about copyright.

Legal Cases: Open Education

In the 16 years since our licenses were first published, the number of lawsuits turning on the interpretation of a CC license has been extremely low, especially considering that more than 1.4 billion CC-licensed works are available on the Internet. CC licenses in court have fared incredibly well in court and disputes are rare when compared to the number of lawsuits between parties to privately negotiated, custom licenses.[1]

In 2017-2018 there were three legal cases: Great Minds vs. FedEx Office, Great Minds vs. Office Depot, and  Philpot v Media Research Center. The outcomes of the court decisions for these three cases favored the enforceability of CC licenses and their role enabling sharing of content with the public.

Great Minds vs. FedEx Office, Great Minds vs. Office Depot[2]

Two of the three cases were raised by Great Minds, a curriculum developer. In these two cases, Great Minds received public funding from New York State to develop OER for school districts, which the organization licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Great Minds brought the court cases against commercial copy shops that were hired by school districts to reproduce NC-licensed open educational resources (OER). The OER was for school use, qualified as non commercial purposes.

Great Minds makes a common assertion in both cases: school districts are not allowed to outsource the reproduction of educational materials licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 to contractors (the contractors are the commercial print shops in these cases) who make a profit on those reproductions. Great Minds’ theory was that it was lawful for a school district employee to go to a copy shop and pay to use their copiers; however, if the same school employee pays the copy shop to hit “PRINT” instead, the copy shop is no longer working on behalf of, or under the direction of the school district– but instead acting independently;  thereby the copy shop has to directly rely on its own NC license to make and charge a fee for the very same copies.

Because they applied a non commercial license, Great Minds claimed that the school districts working with the OER were not allowed to engage FedEx or Office Depot to reproduce the materials, and that because the copy shops made a profit, they violated the license. Importantly, Great Minds never alleged that the school districts’ use of the reproduced materials violated the non commercial restriction of the license.

The central question in both cases is whether a licensee (a school district that is properly using the work for non commercial purposes) may outsource the reproduction of the works to another entity who makes a profit on those reproductions, without the entity it pays becoming a copyright infringer under the NC license.

In both cases, the district courts agreed with the copy shop and found no copyright infringement or violation of the CC license. For additional details on the court cases, see the additional resources section.

Philpot v Media Research Center Inc.[3]

The third case, Philpot v Media Research Center, involved Larry Philpot, who voluntarily shared  two photographs on Wikimedia under a Creative Commons license. Philpot complained that Media Research Center (MRC) infringed his copyrights when it published his photographs in articles without attribution.

Following discovery (the phase of litigation during which factual evidence is gathered), MRC filed a motion for summary judgment asking the court to find that it did not infringe Philpot’s copyrights because it used the photos for purposes of news and commentary and those uses constitute fair use under U.S. copyright law.

In its decision granting the motion for summary judgment, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia rejected Philpot’s argument that a “meeting of the minds” had to occur before the CC license used by Philpot applied.

The district court ultimately found that MRC’s uses of the two photographs constituted fair use under U.S. copyright law, and as a result MRC did not violate Philpot’s copyrights. The court concluded that because fair use applied, MRC did not infringe Philpot’s copyrights, and therefore attribution under the CC license was not required. Compliance with the license was not violated because copyright license does not apply where fair use applies.

Fair use eliminates the need to rely on or comply with the CC license. This is the core design of all CC licenses – CC licenses grant permission when permission is required under copyright law. They communicate the licensor’s intention to grant permission where permission is needed. And, CC licenses are designed to be effective and enforceable without necessarily meeting the requirements of a contract. The law of contracts or obligations varies around the world, and there are some legal systems that may treat CC licenses as enforceable under the law of obligations. This court correctly determined that under U.S. law the licenses effectively grant permission without needing to meet the formal requirements of a contract because the intention to grant permission is all that is needed.

Final remarks

Sharing your content using Creative Commons licenses is generous, but that alone isn’t enough to make it easy for others to reuse and remix your work. Spend some time thinking from the perspective of someone who finds your shared content. How easy is it for them to download, reuse, and/or revise it? Are there legal or technical obstacles that make it difficult for them to do the things the CC license is designed to allow?

1. One of Creative Commons' roles remains serving a responsible public license steward, actively providing guidance and education about our licenses. When Creative Commons considers weighing in on disputes with commentary or the filing of friend-of-the-court briefs, CC always acts an advocate for the licenses and their proper interpretation, never in favor or against a particular litigant. For a detailed analysis of Creative Commons Case Law, see Module 3.4 “License Enforceability.” Creative Commons maintains a database of court decisions and case law from jurisdictions around the world on its wiki here. ↵

2. The official names of the court cases are: “Great Minds v FedEx Office and Print Services, Inc., U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York (Civil Action 2:16-cv-01462-DRH-ARL)” and “Great Minds v Office Depot, Inc., U.S. District Court for the Central District of California (CV 17-7435-JFW).” ↵

3. The official name of the court case is “Larry Philpot v Media Research Center Inc., U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Case 1:17-cv-822.” ↵

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4.3 Finding and Reusing CC-Licensed Work

The commons of CC-licensed and public domain works is a plentiful resource available to all of us. When you draw from it, remember to give credit to the creator and follow the other relevant license terms.

Learning Outcomes

- Search for and discover CC-licensed works

- Give proper attribution when reusing CC-licensed works

Big Question / Why It Matters

There are more than a billion CC-licensed works on the web. How do you find what might be useful to you? And once you do, what do you need to do when you reuse it?

There are several different ways to go about discovering CC-licensed works. Search engines can help you search across the web, or you can target particular platforms or sites. When you find a work to reuse, the most important thing to do is provide proper attribution.

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

Think about what CC-licensed works you have seen or interacted with over the years. How did you find them? Did you know how to attribute the author if you shared the work?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

When you are seeking CC licensed works to reuse, there are several strategies to consider. One good starting point is CC Search, which is a tool that lets you search 12 major repositories of CC content online. Creative Commons is currently working on a project to improve the search tools it offers to help people discover works in the commons. Check out the prototype of a new version of CC Search that lets you create and save lists of works you like and includes a tool that enables you to give attribution with a single click.

These search tools only scratch the surface of what is in the commons. Many platforms that enable CC licensing of works shared on their sites also have their own search filters to find CC content, like OER Commons.

If there is a particular type of content you are looking for, you may be able to narrow down particular sources to explore. Wikipedia offers a fairly comprehensive listing of many major sources of CC material across various domains.

You can also search for works under a particular CC license. Take a look at the Creative Commons overview of each license that includes examples of projects and people using those licenses:

- Examples of use organized by CC License

- Examples of works placed into the Public Domain using CC0

Reusing CC Content

When you find a CC work you want to reuse, the single most important thing to know is how to provide attribution. All CC licenses require that attribution be given to the creator. (Remember that unlike the CC licenses, CC0 is not a license but a public domain dedication tool, so it does not require attribution in its terms. Nevertheless, giving credit or citing the source is typically considered best practice even when not legally required.)

The elements of attribution are simple, though generally speaking, the more information you can provide, the better. People like to understand where CC licensed works come from, and creators like to know their names will remain attached to their works. If an author has provided extensive information in their attribution notice, retain it where possible.

As mentioned in section 4.1, the best practice for attribution is applying the “TASL” approach.

- T = Title

- A = Author

- S = Source

- L = License

The attribution requirements in the CC licenses are purposefully designed to be fairly flexible to account for the many ways content is used. A filmmaker will have different options for giving credit than a scientist publishing an academic paper. Explore this page about Best Practices for Attribution on the CC wiki. Among the options listed, think about how you would prefer to be attributed for your own work.

Creative Commons is also exploring ways to automate attribution. Take a look at this page of results from the CC search tool. Click on a couple of different photos to see how attribution is given, and experiment with the “copy credit as text” and “copy credit as HTML” functions.

The other main consideration when copying works (as opposed to remixing, which will be covered in the next learning unit) is the NonCommercial restriction. If the work you are using is published with one of the three CC licenses that includes the NC element, then you need to ensure you are not using it for a commercial purpose.

Remember, you can always reach out to the creator if you want to request extra permission beyond what the license allows.

Final remarks

Attribution is arguably the single most important aspect of Creative Commons licensing. Think about why you want credit for your own work, even when it may not be legally required. What value does attribution provide to authors, and to the public who comes across the work online?

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4.4 Remixing CC-Licensed Work

Combining and adapting CC-licensed works is where things can get a little tricky. This lesson will give you the tools you need.

“Combination of chilies” by City Foodsters is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Learning Outcomes

- Describe the basics of what it means to create an adaptation

- Explain the scope of the ShareAlike clause

- Explain the scope of the NoDerivatives clause

- Identify what license compatibility means and how to determine whether licenses are compatible

Big Question / Why It Matters

The great promise of Creative Commons licensing is that it increases the pool of content from which we can draw to create new works. To take advantage of this potential, you have to understand when and how you can incorporate and adapt CC licensed works. This requires careful attention to the particular CC licenses that apply, as well as a working understanding of the legal concept of adaptations as a matter of copyright.

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

Have you ever wondered how to use CC licensed work created by someone else in something you are creating? Have you ever come across CC licensed work you wanted to reuse but were unsure about whether doing so would require you to apply a ShareAlike license to what you created?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Copying a CC licensed work and sharing it is pretty simple. Just make sure to provide attribution and refrain from using it for commercial purposes if it is licensed with one of the NonCommercial licenses.

But what if you are changing a CC licensed work or incorporating it into a new work? First, remember that if your use of someone else’s CC licensed work falls under an exception or limitation to copyright (like fair use or fair dealing), then you have no obligations under the CC license. If that is not the case, you need to rely on the CC license for permission to adapt the work. The threshold question then becomes, is what you are doing creating an adaptation?

Adaptation (or derivative work, as it is called in some parts of the world) is a term of art in copyright law. [1] It means creating something new from a copyrighted work that is sufficiently original to itself be protected by copyright. This is not always easy to determine, though some bright lines do exist. Read this explanation on the CC site about what constitutes an adaptation. Some examples of adaptations include a film based on a novel or a translation of a book from one language into another.

Keep in mind that not all changes to a work result in the creation of an adaptation, such as spelling corrections. Also remember that to constitute an adaptation, the resulting work itself must be considered based on or derived from the original. This means that if you use a few lines from a poem to illustrate a poetry technique in an article you’re writing, your article is not an adaptation because your article is not derived from or based on the poem from which you took a few lines. However, if you rearranged the stanzas in the poem and added new lines, then almost always the resulting work would be considered an adaptation.

Here are some particular types of uses to consider (some of them should be familiar from earlier lessons!):

- Taking excerpts of a larger work. Read the relevant FAQ here.

- Using a work in a different format. Read the relevant FAQ here.

- Modifying a work. Read the relevant FAQ here.

Fundamental principle: As of Version 4.0, all CC licenses, even the NoDerivatives licenses, allow anyone to make an adaptation of a CC licensed work. The difference between the ND licenses and the other licenses is that if an adaptation of an ND-licensed work has been created, it cannot be shared with others. This allows, for example, an individual user to create adaptations of an ND licensed work. But ND does not allow the individual to share adaptations with the public.

If your reuse of a CC licensed work does not create an adaptation, then…

- …it does not require you to ShareAlike if you are using an SA-licensed work.

- …the ND restriction does not apply if you are using an ND-licensed work, and

- …you can combine that CC licensed material with other work as long as you attribute and comply with the NonCommercial restriction if it applies.

If your reuse of a CC licensed work does create an adaptation, then there are limits on whether and how you may share the adapted work. We will look at those next. But first, a note about collections of materials.

Adaptations / Remixes vs. Collections

Introductory note: The distinction between adaptations and collections is one of the trickiest concepts in copyright law. While there are many situations in which the differences are clear, there are also several ambiguous scenarios. The distinction between adaptations and remixes varies by jurisdiction and, even within a given jurisdiction, a judge’s determination between the two can be subjective, since there are few definitive rules on which to rely.

In contrast to an adaptation or remix, a collection involves the assembly of separate and independent creative works into a collective whole. A collection is not an adaptation. One community member likened the difference between adaptations and collections to smoothies and TV dinners, respectively.

1. Like a smoothie, an adaptation / remix mixes material from different sources to create a wholly new creation:

Attributions: “CC Smoothie” by Nate Angell. CC BY. Derivative of “Strawberry Smoothie On Glass Jar” by Element5 (https://www.pexels.com/photo/strawberry-smoothie-on-glass-jar-775032/) in the public domain, and various Creative Commons license buttons by Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads) used under CC BY.

In a “smoothie” or adaptation / remix, you often cannot tell where one open work ends and another one begins. While this flexibility is useful for the new creator, it is still important to provide attribution to the individual parts that went into making the adaptation.

An example of an education adaptation would be an open textbook chapter that weaves together multiple open educational resources in such a way that the reader can’t tell which resource was used on which page. That said, the endnotes of the book chapter should still provide attribution to all of the sources that were remixed in the chapter.

2. Like a TV dinner, a collection compiles different works together while keeping them organized as distinct separate objects. An example of a collection would be a book that compiles openly-licensed essays from different sources.

Attributions: “CC TV Dinner” by Nate Angell. CC BY. Derivative of “tv dinner 1″ by adrigu (https://flic.kr/p/6AMLDF) used under CC BY, and various Creative Commons license buttons by Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads) used under CC BY.

When you create a collection, you must provide attribution and licensing information about the individual works in your collection. This gives the public the information they need to understand who created what and which license terms apply to specific content. Revisit Section 4.1 on choosing a license to learn how to properly indicate the copyright status of third party works that you incorporate into your new work.

When you combine material into a collection, you may have a separate copyright of your own that you may license. However, your copyright only extends to the new contributions you made to the work. In a collection, that is the selection and arrangement of the various works in the collection, and not the individual works themselves. For example, you can select and arrange pre-existing poems published by others into an anthology, write an introduction, and design a cover for the collection, but your copyright and the only copyright you can license extends to your arrangement of the poems (not the poems themselves), and your original introduction and cover. The poems are not yours to license.

What happens when you create an adaptation of a CC licensed work or works?

General rules:

→ If the underlying work is licensed under a NoDerivatives license, you can make and use changes privately but you cannot share your adaptation with others, as discussed above.

→ If the underlying work is licensed under a ShareAlike license, then ShareAlike applies to your adaptation and you must license it under the same or a compatible license. More on this below.

→ You need to consider license compatibility. License compatibility is the term used to address the issue of which types of licensed works can be adapted into a new work.

→ In all cases, you have to attribute the original work when you create an adaptation.

Scenarios:

When creating an adaptation of a CC licensed work, the simplest scenario is when you take a single CC licensed work and adapt it.

The more complicated scenario is when you are adapting two or more CC licensed works into a new work.

In both situations, you need to consider what options you have for licensing the copyright you have in your adaptation; this is called the Adapter’s License. Remember that your rights in your adaptation only apply to your own contributions. The original license continues to govern reuse of the elements from the original work that you used when creating your adaptation. This Adapters License Chart chart may be a helpful guide. When creating an adaptation of material under the license identified in the left hand column, you may license your contributions to the adaptation under one of the licenses indicated on the top row if the corresponding box is green. CC does not recommend using a license if the corresponding box is yellow, although doing so is technically permitted by the terms of the license. If you do, you should take additional care to mark the adaptation as involving multiple copyrights under different terms so that downstream users are aware of their obligations to comply with the licenses from all rights holders. Dark gray boxes indicate those licenses that you may not use as your adapter’s license.

CC Adapters License Chart / CC BY 4.0

How to pick your Adapter’s License:

- If the underlying work is licensed with BY or BY-NC, we recommend your adapter’s license include at least the same license elements as the license applied to the original. For example, if I adapt a BY-NC work, I will apply BY-NC to my adaptation. If I adapt a BY work, I could apply either BY or BY-NC to my adaptation.

- If the underlying work is licensed with BY-SA or BY-NC-SA, your adapter’s license must be the same license applied to the original or a license that is designated as compatible to the original license. We’ll discuss license compatibility in more detail below.

- Remember, if the underlying work is licensed with BY-ND or BY-NC-ND, you cannot distribute adaptations so you don’t need to be concerned about what adapter’s license to apply.

Understanding license compatibility

When people talk about licenses being “compatible,” they can be referring to several different situations.

One type of license compatibility involves the question of what licenses you can use for your adapter’s license when you adapt a work. This is what we discussed above. For example, BY-NC is compatible with BY, in the sense that I can adapt a BY work and use BY-NC on my adaptation.

By definition, the ShareAlike licenses have very few compatible licenses. All SA licenses after version 1.0 allow you to use a later version of the same license on your adaptation. For example, if you remix a BY-SA 2.0 work, you can, and should, apply BY-SA 4.0 to your adaptation. There are also a small number of non-CC licenses that have been designated as CC Compatible Licenses for ShareAlike purposes. You can read more about that here.

Another type of license compatibility relates to what licenses are compatible when adapting (more commonly referred to as “remixing” in this context) more than one pre-existing work. The remix chart below may be a helpful guide in these circumstances. To use the chart, find a license that applies to one of the works on the left column and the license that applies to the other work on the top right row. If there is a check mark in the box where that row and column intersect, then the works under those two licenses can be remixed. If there is an “X” in the box, then the works may not be remixed unless an exception or limitation applies.

CC License Compatibility Chart / CC BY 4.0

When using the chart, you can determine which license to use for your adaptation by choosing the more restrictive of the two licenses on the works you are combining. While that technically isn’t your only option for your adapter’s license, it is best practice because it eases reuse for downstream users.

Final remarks

It can be intimidating to approach remix in a way that is consistent with copyright. In this lesson, hopefully you gained some tools for how to approach the task. The threshold question is  whether an adaptation under copyright is created. Once that is answered, you have the information you need to determine what works from the commons you can incorporate into your work.

1. You learned about the terms “adaptation” and “derivative work” in Unit 2, and how CC licenses use those terms. To revisit that information, see here. ↵

22

Additional Resources

Additional details on the court cases in section 4.2:

In the FedEx Office case, the decision was affirmed by the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which stated: “In sum, the unambiguous terms of License permit FedEx to copy the Materials on behalf of a school district exercising rights under the License and charge that district for that copying at a rate more than FedEx’s cost, in the absence of any claim that the school district is using the Materials for other than a ‘non-Commercial purpose.’ The motion to dismiss is granted.”

With the Office Depot case, Great Minds claimed the copy store violated the BY-NC-SA 4.0 license for the same reasons FedEx Office did; however, Great Minds also claimed that because Office Depot reached out to school districts to solicit reproduction orders, that the solicitation is additional evidence of a license violation. The other difference with the FedEx Office case was that Great Minds and Office Depot had entered into a contract specifying Office Depot could reproduce the same publicly-funded educational materials for school districts and would pay royalties to Great Minds.[1]

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California agreed with Office Depot, stating it “concludes that the Creative Commons Public License unambiguously grants the licensee schools and school districts the right “to reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part, for NonCommercial purposes only,” and does not prohibit the schools and school districts from employing third parties, such as Office Depot, to make copies of the Materials. . . . Because the schools and school districts are the entities exercising the rights granted under the Creative Commons Public License, it is irrelevant that Office Depot may have profited from making copies for schools and school districts.”

Further, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California stated: “The Creative Commons Public License at issue authorizes schools to: (1) reproduce and use the Materials for NonCommercial purposes, (2) expressly permits the schools to provide those Materials to the public “by any means or process,” and (3) does not prohibit the schools from outsourcing the copying to third party vendors. Because a licensee may lawfully use a third party agent or contractor to assist it in exercising its licensed rights, absent contractual provisions prohibiting such activity, Great Minds has failed to allege that Office Depot’s conduct was outside the scope of the license and, thus, Great Minds’ claim for copyright infringement against Office Depot fails.” The Office Depot case is on appeal before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals as of June 2018. The court also addressed Office Depot’s alleged solicitation of school districts’ reproduction business. The court did not find the difference urged by Great Minds persuasive or that it should change the outcome.

More information about modifying the licenses

Selected Frequently Asked Questions by Creative Commons. Licensed CC-BY 4.0

- Can I change the license terms and conditions? https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-change-the-license-terms-or-conditions

- Can I enter into separate or supplemental agreements with users of my work?  https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-enter-into-separate-or-supplemental-agreements-with-users-of-my-work

Modifying the CC Licenses by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0

- Creative Commons policy guidance for modifying the CC licenses

- https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Modifying_the_CC_licenses

More information about marking licensed works

Marking/Creators/Marking Third Party Content by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0

- Wiki with best practices and nuanced information on marking

- https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Marking/Creators/Marking_third_party_content#Additional_explanation_and_tips

More information about license compatibility

Compatible Licenses by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0

- A page with information on which licenses are compatible, how compatibility works,
and where there may not necessarily be compatibility between licenses

- https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses

Wiki/CC License Compatibility by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0

- More information on the CC license compatibility chart

- https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Wiki/cc_license_compatibility

License Compatibility. CC BY-SA 3.0

- Wikipedia article on license compatibility including open licenses that are not CC licenses

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility

More scholarship about CC licenses

Creative Commons Licenses Legal Pitfalls: Incompatibilities and Solutions by Melanie Dulong de Rosnay at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam & Creative Commons Netherland. CC BY 3.0 NL

- A detailed report on more nuanced and legal aspects of incompatibilities that applies in a variety of international applications

- https://www.creativecommons.nl/downloads/101220cc_incompatibilityfinal.pdf

User Related Drawbacks of Open Content Licensing by Till Kreutzer in Open Content Licensing: From Theory to Practice, edited by Lucie Guibault and Christina Angelopoulos. CC BY NC 3.0

- Book chapter about some complicated issues that pertain to users of openly licensed materials (including CC licenses)

- https://books.google.ca/books?id=RW1P5XOp_NoC&lpg=PA127&dq&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Participant Recommended Resources

CC Certificate participants’ recommended many additional resources through Hypothes.is annotations on the Certificate website. While Creative Commons has not vetted these resources, we wanted to highlight participant’s contributions here: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccerteducomments/chapter/additional-resources-4/

1. According to the complaint, this contract was entered into while FedEx Office was pending. However, once the district court granted the motion to dismiss in favor of FedEx Office, Office Depot terminated its contract with Great Minds shortly before it expired and, in reliance on the FedEx Office decision, continued to reproduce Great Minds’ materials for school districts without paying royalties to Great Minds. ↵

V

Unit 5: CC for Educators

23

5. CC for Educators

Creative Commons powers the open education movement with tools that help create better, more flexible and sustainable open educational resources (OER), practices, and policies.

Creative Commons licenses are the most popular open licenses among education projects around the world. This unit will introduce you to the specifics of using CC licenses and CC licensed content for education purposes.

This unit has five sections:

- 5.1 OER, Open Textbooks, and Open Courses

- 5.2 Finding, Evaluating, and Adapting Resources

- 5.3 Creating and Sharing OER

- 5.4 Open Pedagogy / Practices

- 5.5 Opening Up Your Institution

There are also additional resources if you are interested in learning more about any of the topics covered in this unit. Likewise, you may be interested in reading 5.1 (LIB): Open Access to Scholarship, a subchapter included in the CC Certificate for Librarians Course.

Before you jump in, consider joining the Creative Commons Open Education Platform. Your input can help us identify, plan, and coordinate multi-national open education content, practices, and policy projects to collaboratively solve education challenges around the world. Be sure to briefly tell us (a) why you’d like to join and (b) who you are – this helps CC avoid accepting spammers.

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5.1 OER, Open Textbooks, and Open Courses

Open education is an idea, as well as a set of content, practices, policy, and community which, properly leveraged, can help everyone in the world access free, effective, open learning materials for the marginal cost of zero. For the first time in history, educators around the world can create, open, and share high quality, effective learning materials with everyone who wants to learn. The key to this transformational shift in learning is Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are education materials that are shared at no cost with legal permissions for the public to freely use, share, and build upon the content.

OER are possible because:

- education resources are (mostly) born digital[1] and digital resources can be stored, copied, and distributed for near zero cost;

- the internet makes it simple for the public to share digital content; and

- Creative Commons licenses make it simple and legal to retain copyright and legally share education resources with the world.

Because we can share effective education materials with the world for near zero cost, many people argue that educators and governments who support public education have a moral and ethical obligation to do so. This argument roots in the premise that education is fundamentally about sharing knowledge and ideas. Creative Commons believes OER will replace much of the expensive, proprietary content used in academic courses. Shifting to this model will generate more equitable economic opportunities and social benefits globally without sacrificing quality of education content.

Big Question / Why It Matters

Does it seem reasonable that education in the age of the internet should be more expensive and less flexible than it was in previous generations? As people and knowledge are increasingly networked and available online, what will it mean for learning, work, and society?

As economies become increasingly global and networked, the skills and knowledge required to successfully acquire and keep good jobs require a higher education.All national governments invest in and have strategic goals for how their public education systems can support individuals, families, and the broader society.

While many interesting and useful experiments are occurring outside formal education, the degrees, certificates, and other credentials awarded by formal institutions are still critically important to the quality of life of many people around the world.

Open Educational Resources: The Education Ecosystem Comes to Life by opensourceway CC BY-SA 2.0

As noted, formal education, even in the age of the internet, can be more expensive and less flexible than ever. In many countries, publishers of education materials overcharge for textbooks and other resources. As part of their transition from print to digital, these same companies have largely moved away from a model where learners purchase and own books to a “streaming” model where they have access for a limited time.

Further, publishers are constantly developing restrictive technologies that limit what learners and faculty can do with the resources they have temporary access to, including inventing novel ways to prohibit printing, prevent cutting and pasting, and restrict the sharing of materials between friends.

Learning Outcomes

- Define “open” in the context of open educational resources (OER)

- Differentiate between OER, open textbooks, open courses, and MOOCs

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

What impacts have the rising costs and decreased flexibility of education materials had on you and those you know? What role do you imagine all-rights-reserved copyright and related laws have played in driving up costs and driving down flexibility for learners and teachers?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

OER and Open Textbooks

To begin, watch this video Why OER? (time 03:48)

Open Educational Resources (OER) are: teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others.[2]

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

The Council of Chief State School Officers, CC BY 4.0. Music by The Zeppelin by Blue Dot Sessions, CC BY NC 4.0.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are: teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others.[3]

Or you could use this less technical definition to describe OER to someone:

OER are education materials that can be freely downloaded, edited, and shared to better serve all students. [4]

In contrast to traditional education materials, which are constantly becoming more expensive and less flexible, OER provide everyone, everywhere, free permission to download, edit, and share them with others. David Wiley provides another popular definition, stating that only education materials licensed in a manner that provide the public with permission to engage in the 5R activities can be considered OER.

The 5Rs include:

1. Retain – permission to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)

2. Reuse – permission to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

3. Revise – permission to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

4. Remix – permission to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

5. Redistribute – permission to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of to a friend)

The easiest way to confirm that an education resource is an *open* education resource that provides you with the 5R permissions is to determine that the resource is either in the public domain or has been licensed under a Creative Commons license that permits the creation of derivative works – CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, or CC BY-NC-SA.

OER comes in all shapes and sizes. A piece of OER can be as small as a single video or simulation, and can be as large as an entire degree program. It can be difficult, or at least time consuming for teachers to assemble OER into a collection comprehensive enough to replace an all rights reserved copyright textbook. For this reason, OER are often collected and presented in ways that resemble a traditional textbook in order to make them easier for instructors to understand and adopt.

The term “open textbook” simply means a collection of OER that have been organized to look like a traditional textbook in order to ease the adoption process. To see examples of open textbooks in a number of disciplines, visit OpenStax,the Open Textbook Libraryor BCcampus Open Education.

Other times, OER are aggregated and presented as digital courseware. To see examples of open courseware, visit the Open Education Consortium and MIT OCW.

In addition to demonstrating that learners save money when their teachers adopt OER, research shows that learners can have betteroutcomes when their teachers choose OER instead of education materials available under all rights reserved copyright.

The idea of OER is strongly advocated by a broad range of individuals, organizations, and governments, as evidenced by documents like the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (2007) and Cape Town +10 (2017), the UNESCO Paris OER Declaration (2012), UNESCO Ljubljana OER Action Plan (2017), and the UNESCO OER Recommendation (in draft, as of December, 2018).

OER vs. Free Library Resources

Teachers and professors typically use a mix of all-rights-reserved commercial content, free library resources, and OER in their courses. While the library resources are “free” to the learners and faculty at that institution, they are (a) not “free” as the institution library has to pay to purchase or subscribe to them, and (b) not available to the general public. This chart describes the cost to learners and the legal permissions available to teachers and learners for each of these types of educational resources.

David Wiley. Slide. CC BY 4.0

OER in Primary / Secondary (K-12) vs. Tertiary (Higher Education)

OER is used in all sectors of education. How OER is produced and adopted, however, is often different depending on the level of education in which you work.

In general, tertiary (higher education) faculty are more likely to:

- have time, resources and support to produce and revise educational resources,

- own the copyright to content they create (though it depends on their contract with the college / university), and

- make unilateral decisions (see academic freedom) regarding what content is used in their courses.

As such, tertiary (higher education) faculty are often OER producers and can decide whether or not to adopt OER in their courses. OER adoption in tertiary (higher education) tends to occur one faculty member at a time. Given this opportunity, it is critical faculty be given time, resources and support for the creation and adoption of open education content and a shift to open education practices / pedagogy. Example: British Columbia Faculty wrote an Open Textbook

In general, primary / secondary (K-12) teachers are less likely to:

- have time, resources and support to produce and revise educational resources,

- own the copyright to content they create (though it depends on their contract with the school / district), and

- make unilateral decisions regarding what content is used in their curriculum.

As such, OER adoption in primary and secondary (K-12) schools tends to occur at the district or school, rather than the individual teacher level. Example: Open policies in New Zealand schools

Open Educational Resources (a very brief timeline)

While there isn’t enough space in this Certificate give a comprehensive overview of the “History of Open Education,” here are several of the pivotal events that contributed to the growth of the open education movement. (If you know of additional critical events to include, please tell us and we will update the timeline. Thanks!)

- 1969 – UK Open University opens

- 1983 – Free software movement founded with launch of GNU

- 1989 – World Wide Web

- 1997 – MERLOT

- 1998 – U.S. Copyright Term Extension Act

- 1998 – “Open content” term is coined and Open Content License released

- 1999 – Open Publication License released

- 1999 – Connexions launches (renamed OpenStax in 2012)

- 2001 – Wikipedia

- 2001 – Creative Commons founded

- 2001 – MIT Courseware

- 2002 – Budapest Open Access Initiative

- 2002 – Creative Commons licenses launched

- 2002 – UNESCO coined the name Open Educational Resources

- 2004 – First annual Open Education Conference

- 2005 – OpenCourseWare Consortium formed (renamed the Open Education Consortium in 2014)

- 2006 – WikiEducator

- 2007 – Cape Town OER Declaration

- 2007 – OER Commons

- 2007 – Wiley and Couros experiment with “open courses”

- 2008 – Opening Up Education published

- 2008 – Connectivism and Connected Knowledge

- > 2000 learners participated, leading to the term “massive open online course” or MOOC. Watch this video describing MOOCs:”What is a MOOC?” video (4:26) by Dave Cormier, CC BY 3.0

- 2012 – OpenStax releases first open textbook

- 2012 – UNESCO OER Paris Declaration

- 2013 – OERu launched

- 2017 – UNESCO 2nd World OER Congress

- 2018 – UNESCO drafting an OER Recommendation

Final remarks

OER, whether organized as open textbooks or opencourseware, provide teachers, learners, and others with a broad range of permissions that make education more affordable and more flexible. These permissions also enable rapid, low-cost experimentation and innovation, as educators seek to maximize access to effective educational resources for all.

1. Most OER are “born” digital, though OER can be made available to learners in both digital and printed formats. Of course, digital OER are easier to share, modify, and redistribute, but being digital is not what makes something an OER or not. ↵

2. Drafted by OER Communications: a coalition of North American open education advocates working on OER communication: oer-comms@googlegroups.com↵

3. Creative Commons adaptation of the UNESCO OER definition: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/open-educational-resources  ↵

4. Drafted by OER Comms: a coalition of North American open education advocates working on OER communication: oer-comms@googlegroups.com↵

25

5.2 Finding, Evaluating, and Adapting Resources

We live in a visual and vibrant culture that requires educators to provide relevant learning resources in the classroom, though finding and reusing others’ great works is not always simple. This unit will teach you how to find others’ OER and adapt them for use in your own classrooms.

Big Question / Why It Matters

What skills and knowledge are needed to find the OER you and your learners need? If you are going to join the global open education community, find the best open resources for your course, and share your good work as OER, you need to know – and know how to teach others – how to find, evaluate, and adapt openly licensed resources. What if we want to think bigger… what effect might open education have globally?

How is the openness, the opportunity to revise, remix and share, of content potentially impactful on a global scale? If the public had access to and could creatively remix the world’s knowledge, what new opportunities might we find to address global challenges (e.g. United Nations Sustainable Development Goals)?

Cell phone by Tiago Aguiar. Public domain: CC0

Learning Outcomes

- Find OER in open repositories, Google, CC Search, and other platforms

- Evaluate how to reuse / revise / remix the OER you find

- Demonstrate how different OER can be used together, paying attention to license compatibility.

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

Where do you currently find your learning resources? Do you seek open alternatives for materials you currently use? How do you evaluate your existing learning resources, and how can you apply those measures to openly licensed content?

Once you identify the learning resources you currently use, ask yourself the following questions:

- Is this resource available to all of my learners at no cost?

- Can my learners and I keep a copy of this resource forever?

- Does my class have the legal rights to fix errors, update old or inaccurate content, improve the work, and share it with other educators around the world?

- Can my learners contribute to and improve our learning resources as part of their course work?

If the answer to these questions is “No” – you’re likely using learning resources that don’t provide the legal permissions you and your learners need to do what you want to do. Conversely, if you answered “Yes” to all of the questions – you are likely using OER.

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Finding resources

Not everything on the internet is OER, and some works labeled as “open” may not have the legal permissions to exercise the 5Rs. So how do you recognize OER and how do you choose which OER will work best in your class? Remember: for a resource to be an OER – it has to (a) be available to everyone at no cost and (b) be in the public domain or under an open license that gives everyone 5 Rs legal permissions to modify the resource.

Finding the resources you want to use is the first step to bringing OER into your classroom. Discovery is one of the primary barriers to educators using OER. Fortunately, there are many established ways to search for OER.

First, for a short introduction on how to find OER, watch this video “How can I find OER?” (1:31).

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

“How can I find OER?” Video by Council of Chief State School Officers, CC BY 4.0. Music by Lahaina by Blue Dot Sessions: CC BY NC 4.0

Do a quick review of OER projects and people on the OER World Map to get a sense of global OER activities

There are many websites that host large collections of OER (e.g., Wikimedia Commons), but some universities host their own OER repositories and services. A good first step is to do a general OER search using Google Advanced Search and filter your results by “Usage Rights” (pull-down menu at the bottom of the screen). See Google’s post on how to use the tool effectively.

In addition to sharing your OER on your website or blog, there are hundreds of online platforms on which you can share your openly licensed content. Creative Commons maintains a directory of some of the most popular OER platforms used by educators organized by content type (photos, video, audio, textbooks, courses, etc).

Open educators often ask each other for help when looking for OER on open edu listservs. Here are a few you might want to join:

- CC Open Education Platform (invitation)

- Please tell us who you are and why you would like to join.

- OER Forum

- International OER Advocacy

- OER Discuss

- Open Knowledge Open Edu

- Open Edu SIG

- Wikimedia Education

- US OER Advocacy

- SPARC: Library OER

- Educause Openness

If you want to know more about most popular general options for searching for OER, read this Open Washington course module.

COMING SOON! Creative Commons is redesigning its CC Search.[1] You can play with the beta (images only) at: https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org  When the new CC Search is done, it will search the entire Commons – all of the public domain and CC licensed works on the Internet… including OER.

Evaluating resources

As with all education resources, OER need to be evaluated before use. Educators who are new to OER may have concerns about quality because OER are available for free and may have been remixed by other educators. The process of using and evaluating OER is not that different from evaluating traditional all-rights-reserved copyright resources. Whether education materials are openly licensed or closed, you are the best judge of quality because you know what your learners need and what your curriculum demands.

Subject specialists (educators and librarians) assess the quality and suitability of learning resources, often along the following criteria:

- Accuracy

- Reputation of author/institution

- Standard of technical production

- Accessibility

- Fitness for purpose

And be careful not to let anyone tell you OER are “low quality” because they are free. As the SPARC OER Mythbusting Guide points out:

- In this increasingly digital and internet connected world, the old adage of “you get what you pay for” is growing outdated. New models are developing across all aspects of society that dramatically reduce or eliminate costs to users, and this kind of innovation has spread to education resources.

- OER publishers have worked to ensure the quality of their resources. Many open textbooks are created within rigorous editorial and peer-review guidelines, and many OER repositories allow faculty to review (and see others’ reviews of) the material. There is also a growing body of evidence that demonstrates that OER can be both free of cost and high quality—and more importantly, support positive student learning outcomes.

Also, be careful not to get pulled into a debate about “high or low quality education resources,” when what educators should really be concerned about is “effectiveness.” Read these two posts from David Wiley: Stop Saying “High Quality” and No, Really – Stop Saying “High Quality.”

Remixing & adapting resources

Openly licensing learning materials enables educators to use the materials more effectively, which can lead to better learning and student outcomes. OER can be remixed and adapted: updated, tailored and improved locally to fit the needs of learners – translating the OER into a local language, adapting a biology open textbook to align it with local science standards, or modifying an OER simulation to make it accessible for a student who cannot hear.

The ideas of remix and adaptation are fundamental to education. Creative reuse of materials created by other educators and authors is about more than just seeking inspiration; we copy, adapt, and combine different materials to craft education resources for our learners.

Photo by José Carlos Cortizo Pérez. CC BY 2.0

Incorporating materials created by others and combining materials from different sources can be tricky, not only from a pedagogical perspective, but also from a copyright perspective.

Online digital education resources have different legal permissions that empower (or not) the public to use, remix and share those resources. Here are a few of those legal categories:

- Public domain works (not restricted by copyright) can be remixed with any work.

- example: Anyone can remix the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

- All-rights-reserved copyrighted works, available for free online, which you can only use under the project terms of service, or using an exception or limitation to copyright, such as fair use or fair dealing.

- example: many MOOCs allow free reuse of their content, but do not allow copying, revise, remix, or redistribution.

- All-rights-reserved copyrighted works in closed formats do not allow the public to remix or adapt a work.

- example: a blockbuster movie available only in streaming service that you cannot use or even link to.

- Creative Commons licensed works (and other free licenses) that have various permissions and restrictions.

- example: Wikipedia (BY-SA) allows you to reuse their content for commercial purposes, while WikiHow (BY-NC-SA) does not. A Wikipedia article cannot be remixed with a WikiHow article.

If you want to know which CC licensed works can be remixed with other CC licensed works, revisit the CC Remix Chart we studied in Section 4.4. Where there is a green check at the intersection of two CC licensed works, you can remix those two works. Where you see a black X, you cannot remix those two CC licensed works.

CC License Compatibility Chart / CC BY 4.0

Final remarks

We live in a world of information abundance, and an increasing percentage of our digital knowledge is openly licensed. Finding the right open resources that fit the needs of your learning spaces and your learners can be a challenge. One of the major motivations for using OER is the ability to revise, remix, and share these works to best suit the needs of your learners. Search engines, OER repositories and platform services with built-in tools for using Creative Commons licenses help, but finding the right OER still takes time.

1. CC’s existing Search tool: https://search.creativecommons.org↵

26

5.3 Creating and Sharing OER

Much of this course focused on how to create openly licensed materials, by sharing the legal perspective and the practical steps needed. In this unit we will explore and practice how to create OER so they can have the biggest impact and be used without any legal or technical barriers.

“Shared” by hansol. CC BY 2.0 (note: image has been removed from the web)

Big Question / Why It Matters

A big part of any educator’s work is preparing, updating, and combining learning materials. Making those materials open requires just a few additional steps, and it’s easier than you think. What are those steps? What should you consider and expect when you want to create and publish your resources in the open?

When we share our education resources as OER, we share our best practices, our expertise, our challenges and solutions. Education is about sharing. When we share our work with more people – we become better educators.

Learning Outcomes

- Imagine how your OER will work in practice.

- Understand how to select a CC license(s) for your resources.

- Examine your open license decision for compatibility (i.e., can it be remixed) with other OER.

- Identify needs and challenges to improving OER accessibility for everyone.

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

What kind of learning resources do you create now? Do you publish or share these resources with other people for feedback? Which of your resources do you think could benefit fellow educators, learners, libraries or scientists? If you choose to share, how much freedom do you want to give to others; what permissions will you allow for others to reuse your work?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Why share?

For an introduction on why it is important to share your work as OER, watch this video:

Open Education Matters: Why is it important to share content? (time 03:51)

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

“Open Education Matters: Why is it important to share content?” video by Nadia Mireles, CC BY 3.0

Because educators and librarians can share OER with everyone for near zero cost[1], we should. After all, education is fundamentally about sharing knowledge and ideas. Libraries are about archiving, sharing and helping learners find the knowledge they seek. When we CC license our work, we are sharing that work with the public under simple, legal permissions. Sharing your work is a gift to the world.

Choosing a CC license for OER

Creative Commons has a suite of six open copyright licenses – and fully support authors’ selection and use of any of the CC licenses or public domain tools. However, not all education materials available under a CC license are OER. Review this chart that details which CC licenses work well for education resources and which do not.

The two CC NoDerivatives (ND) licenses are not OER-compatible licenses because they do not allow the public to revise or remix the education resource. Because the ND licenses do not meet the 5Rs or any of the major OER definitions, the open education movement does not consider ND-licensed education resources “OER.”

Choosing the right license for your OER requires you to think about which permissions you want to give to other users – and which permissions you want to retain for yourself. Read the “Open Textbook Community Advocates CC BY License for Open Textbooks” and think about why they recommend the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) for education. You can find similar text with more arguments made about this same license for publishing scientific research in “Why CC BY?” from Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

For basic information about the licenses, how to choose and apply one to your work or combined works from other people and sources, revisit Section 4.1

CC license legal cases in open education

For a detailed analysis of Creative Commons case law, see Section 3.4 “License Enforceability.” Creative Commons maintains a listing of court decisions and case law from jurisdictions around the world on its wiki.

In 2017-2018 there were two legal cases concerning OER: Great Minds vs. FedEx Office and Great Minds vs. Office Depot. Both cases involved OER used by schools for non commercial purposes. Different school districts asked FedEx and/or Office Depot to print the OER materials for use in their classrooms. The OER in question were created by Great Minds using public funds and licensed by Great Minds under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Great Minds claimed that the school districts were not allowed to engage FedEx to reproduce the materials, and that because FedEx made profit while producing the requested copies, they were violating the license. Importantly, Great Minds never alleged that the school districts’ use of the reproduced materials violated the non commercial restriction of the license. The central question in the case was whether a licensee – a school district – that is properly using the work for non commercial purposes may outsource the reproduction of the works to another who makes a profit doing so.

At the time of publication, in the FedEx case the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that a commercial copyshop may reproduce educational materials at the request of a school district that is using them under a CC BY-NC-SA license. The Office Depot case is still pending appeal.

Other considerations

Other than choosing the right CC license, what other aspects of openness and pedagogy are worth considering? Here is a list of best practices to include in your work when building OER

The Open Washington Module 8 on “Sharing OER” will give you practical advice on how to share OER online and prepare them to be used offline as well.

Encyclopedia and e-book reader on green grass by papirontul. Public domain: CC0

Ensuring OER is Accessible to Everyone

At its core, OER is about making sure everyone has access. Not just rich people, not just people who can see or hear, not just people who can read English, not just people who have digital devices with access to high speed internet – everyone.

As authors and institutions build and share OER, best practices in accessibility need to be part of the instructional and technical design from the start. Educators have legal and ethical responsibilities to ensure our learning resources are fully accessible to all learners, including those with disabilities.

Watch “Simply Said: Understanding Accessibility in Digital Learning Materials” by the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials (6:42)

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

“Simply Said: Understanding Accessibility in Digital Learning Materials” by National Center on Accessible Educational Materials, CC BY 3.0.

Best practices to ensure your OER is accessible to all include:

- putting your work into the public domain (CC0) or adding a non-ND CC license to your work,

- make it simple to download your work in editable file formats, so others can modify and/or translate it to meet local needs and make it accessible, and

- most important – design your work to be accessible from the start.

Final remarks

Openness in education means more than just access or legal certainty over what you are able to use, modify, and share with your learners. Open education means designing content and practices that ensure everyone can actively participate and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. As educators and learners revise others’ OER and create and share new OER, accessibility should always be on your design checklist.

1. While in many other countries (like in many EU member states), cost may not be a problem, restrictive copyright and narrow fair use / fair dealing rights can limit new teaching methods. ↵

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5.4 Open Pedagogy / Practices

Openness in education brings the potential for co-creation and learning through active participation in how knowledge is produced.

Learning Outcomes

- Explain how copyright restricts pedagogy

- Understand the three definitions of open pedagogy, open practices, and OER-enabled pedagogy, and describe how open licensing enables each

- List examples of OER-enabled pedagogy in practice

Big Question / Why It Matters

Do you remember when smartphones were first released? They were full of infinite possibilities compared to earlier phones. Before smartphones, we could only call and text. After smartphones, we can now take videos and pictures, play movies and music, surf the web and read email, and call and text. It was difficult for long-time users of older phones to take advantage of all the capabilities offered by new phones. They were too accustomed to the limitations of older phones. For months – sometimes years – they only used their smartphones only to call and text (maybe you know someone like this!)

Many educators have the same problem with OER. They’ve spent so long using education materials published under restrictive licenses that they struggle to take advantage of the new pedagogical capabilities offered by OER. These pedagogical capabilities are all about the teaching and learning practice and tools that empower learners and teachers to create and share knowledge openly and learn deeply.

Three Definitions

The open education movement is still discussing and debating what it means to think about teaching and learning practices in a more inclusive, diverse and open manner. Read these examples of how various educators approach this topic. At least three major definitions have emerged from this discussion.

- Open Educational Practices (Cronin’s 2018 Open Edu Global presentation):

- Use / reuse / creation of OER and collaborative, pedagogical practices employing social and participatory technologies for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation and sharing, and empowerment of learners.

- Open Pedagogy (DeRosa & Jhangiani’s chapter in the 2017 Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students):

- An access-oriented commitment to learner-driven education and a process of designing architectures and using tools for learning that enable learners to shape the public knowledge commons of which they are a part.

- More at: http://openpedagogy.org/open-pedagogy

- OER-enabled Pedagogy (Wiley & Hilton’s 2018 journal article):

- A set of teaching and learning practices only possible or practical when you have permission to engage in the 5R activities.

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

When you’ve used OER in the past, have you taken advantage of the permissions offered by their open licenses, or did you use OER just like you used your previous, traditionally copyrighted materials? In other words, did you do anything with the OER that was impossible to do with traditionally copyrighted materials? Why or why not?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

It’s well established that people learn through activity. It’s equally well established that copyright restricts people from engaging in a range of activities. When juxtaposed like this, it becomes clear that copyright restricts pedagogy by contracting the universe of things learners and teachers can do with education materials. If there are things learners aren’t allowed to do, there are ways learners aren’t allowed to learn. If there are things teachers aren’t allowed to do, there are ways teachers aren’t allowed to teach.

You can learn about how this restriction on what teachers and learners can do impacts teaching and learning by reading this metaphor / blog post about driving airplanes on roads.

Fly away in a Robinson r22 beta by Archangel12 / CC BY 2.0

Examples of Open Pedagogical Practices, Open Pedagogy, and OER-Enabled Pedagogy

One of the foundational ideas of open teaching and learning practices is the distinction between disposable and renewable assignments.

Do you remember doing homework for school that felt utterly pointless? A “disposable assignment” is an assignment that supports an individual student’s learning but adds no other value to the world – the student spends hours working on it, the teacher spends time grading it, and the student gets it back and then throws it away. While disposable assignments may promote learning by an individual student, these assignments can be demoralizing for people who want to feel like their work matters beyond the immediate moment.

In contrast, “renewable assignments” – assignments that both support individual student learning and add value to the broader world. With renewable assignments, learners are asked to create and openly license valuable artifacts that, in addition to supporting their own learning, will be useful to other learners both inside and outside the classroom. For example, classic renewable assignments include collaborating with learners to write new case studies for textbooks, create “explainer” videos, and modify learning materials to speak more directly to learners’ local cultures and needs.

Explore additional examples of these three pedagogy in action, including David Wiley and Robin DeRosa’s examples of learners adapting existing materials to create new textbooks. In both of these cases, teachers had learners create their own textbooks, which then had Creative Commons licenses applied to them. Other examples of OER enabled pedagogy in action include Murray and Azzam’s assignments that had learners significantly improve articles on Wikipedia. When they completed these assignments, learners created open artifacts useful to both in supporting their own learning and the learning of other learners and educators. These examples have learners creating assignments that allow them to interact with the greater community and ensure that the assignments are renewable, not disposable artifacts.

A couple of other interesting examples of renewable assignments are a remixed explainer video that a student made about Blogs and Wikis, and the DS106 assignment bank, which is a hub for student created, CC licensed content. Additional examples are available on the Open Pedagogy website.

Final remarks

If you’re just going to use your new smartphone the same way you used your old flip phone, there wasn’t much point in getting a new phone! Likewise, when we use OER to support learning in exactly the same ways we used old all rights reserved materials, we may save learners money but miss out on the transformative power of open. As you prepare to use OER in your teaching, think about new things that are possible in the context of permission to engage in the 5R activities.

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5.5 Opening Up Your Institution

How education institutions can support open education content, practices, and community with policy.

Photo by Stories of change, CC BY 2.0

Big Question / Why It Matters

Education institutions around the world are trying to figure out how to support their educators, staff, and learners in using, revising, and sharing OER, with new open education practices, and the communities that sustain them. How can education leaders use various policy tools to support and promote open education?

Learning Outcomes

- Consider if and why you need a policy to accomplish your open education goals

- Understand the menu of open education policy options

- Assess your existing institutional policies

- Understand how to develop an institutional open policy

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

What if there were institutional policies that supported your open education work? What if money and time were available to educators who wanted to redesign their courses to make them open? What if promotion and tenure guidelines rewarded sharing your educational resources and/or research? What effect might pro-open education policies have on you and your learners?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Education institutions have a broad menu of open education policy options from which to choose.

- Raise awareness of the existence of OER and the benefits for your learners and faculty.

- Action: Host an annual “open education” day at your school or university.

- Empower stakeholders to drive your institution’s open education strategy.

- Action: Create an Open Education Task Force comprised of learners, faculty, accessibility experts, deans, bookstore, financial aid, library, instructional designers, eLearning, etc.

- Ensure all of the content you fund is OER.

- Action: Draft, adopt, and implement an open licensing policy requiring university / school funded resources to be openly licensed. Use the OER Policy Development Tool to build an open policy for your institution. You can find examples of open policies others have created at the OER Policy Registry (global) and North American OER policies and projects.

- Issue a call-to-action to solve an education challenge.

- Action: Create an OER Grant Program. Appropriate funds for supporting faculty and staff to shift your 50 highest enrolled courses from closed content to OER.

- Example: The Maricopa County Community College started an open textbook initiative to lower costs of teaching materials. They provided grants to create open courses and train faculty on OER. Learn more about their process here.

- Leverage existing strategic documents to support open education.

- Action: Add open education goals to key institutional strategy documents.

- Action: Identify and track key performance indicators that improve when courses / degrees adopt OER.

- Example: Increasing student outcomes, increasing the percentage of learners who can access 100% of the learning resources on day 1, reducing dropouts during add/drop periods, increasing credits taken per semester, decreasing student debt,, decreasing time to degree.

- Make it easy to share OER.

- Action: Join a global OER repository and make it simple for your educators and learners to find others’ OER and share their OER. Provide professional development.

- Ensure educators have the legal rights to share.

- Action: Change the contract between the institution and the faculty / teachers so the educator has the legal rights to CC license their work.

- Example: A Creative Commons policy in New Zealand gives teachers advance permission to disseminate their resources online for sharing and reuse. The policy also ensures that both the school and the teacher — as well as teachers from around the country and around the world — can continue to use and adapt resources produced by New Zealand teachers in the course of their employment. Creative Commons NZ have developed an annotated policy template for schools to adapt.

- Provide OER information to learners.

- Action: Require OER Course designations in course catalogs so learners can see whether (or not) a course uses OER or an open textbook. Example: CUNY labels OER in their catalog (video).

- Reward sharing.

- Action: Adjust promotion and tenure policies to reward the creation / adoption / maintenance of OER and publishing in Open Access journals. The creation and adaptation of OER should be appropriately recognized as curricular innovation and service to the academic profession during promotion and tenure review.

Enforcing Open Education Policies

The point of most open education policies is to ensure the publicly (or foundation) funded educational resources are available to the public with 5Rs permissions. When it comes to enforcing open education policies, many people play important roles.

The funder and its program officers need to understand the open policy, communicate the importance of it to grantees verbally and in writing, and follow-up by checking to ensure the public has full access to the openly licensed content under the terms of the policy.

The university / college administration should provide support (e.g., hire a full-time OER / OA librarian) to faculty creating, remixing, sharing and adopting OER, and/or redesigning their courses toward open pedagogy / practices. Institutions can also review and modify (as needed) promotion and tenure policies to ensure faculty engaged in open education work are rewarded (not punished) during promotion and tenure review.

Final remarks

When education institutions support their educators, staff, and learners in moving from closed to open content and practices, open education thrives. Educators want to design the best courses, adjust their practices and pedagogy to empower learners to co-create knowledge, and push the limits of knowledge by openly sharing their ideas and resources with a global audience. But educators can’t do it alone. They need political, financial, time, staff, and policy support to shift to, and fully realize, the benefits of open education.

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Additional Resources

More information about remixing and adapting resources

Distinguishing Between OER and All that Other Stuff on the Internet and Works Within Works, and Collections by Maricopa Community College Faculty OER course. Licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0
Course materials if you have any concerns about the copyright status of works you want to remix. These two modules from the Maricopa Community College Faculty OER course will help you understand differences between free, open access, and OER, as well as citations and collections.
https://maricopa.instructure.com/courses/805732/pages/distinguishing-between-oer-and-all-that-other-stuff-on-the-internet?module_item_id=5096076
https://maricopa.instructure.com/courses/805732/pages/works-within-works-and-collections?module_item_id=5220365

BC Open Education Technology Collaborative by BCCampus. Licensed CC-BY 4.0
If you are looking for inspiration on how to bring remixing and adapting resources to your classroom as instructor, this group is a resource for you and the goals and group chat can be informative.
https://opened.ca/

Tricky Copyright Scenarios: OER Style by Maricopa Community College Faculty OER course. Licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0
If you want to test yourself, this quiz about tricky copyright scenarios that apply to OER will help you understand better how to remix and adapt educational materials safely.
https://maricopa.instructure.com/courses/805732/quizzes/821784?module_item_id=5179463

More information about creating and sharing OER

CK12 OER. Licensed CC-BY-NC 3.0
To create an open textbook with existing OER for K-12 education visit this site, login as a teacher and click create new.
https://www.ck12.org/

OER Faculty Workshop by Maricopa Community College Faculty OER course. Licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0
For a deeper dive into the process of choosing the appropriate licenses for educational resources, visit this OER course in full.
https://maricopa.instructure.com/courses/805732

Creating Open Educational Resources by the University of British Columbia. Licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0
A video and information on considerations to make when licensing and sharing OER at higher education institutions.
https://open.ubc.ca/find/creating-open-educational-resources/

More information about accessibility

Module 9: Accessibility by Open Washington: Open Educational Resources Network. Licensed CC-BY 4.0
This module will help you design resources in a way that they will be accessible to all learners.
http://www.openwa.org/module-9/

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 by the World Wide Web Consortium
The WCAG 2.0 is a stable, referenceable technical standard that helps developers of any kind of online content (from websites to text and PDF files), create or check their materials for accessibility. Many grant givers or governments (like the European Union) even require institutions to follow those guidelines when publishing public sector information or education resources.
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

Accessibility and Open Educational Resources by CAST Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education. Licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0
The CAST project (Center for Applied Special Technology that promotes universal design for learning) has a helpful overview and checklist for things to consider when designing educational resources, especially for postsecondary education.
http://udloncampus.cast.org/page/media_oer

More information about open pedagogy

Open Pedagogy Notebook
http://openpedagogy.org

Review the work of Rajiv Jhangiani, Robin DeRosa, Catherine Cronin and Maha Bali to learn more about open pedagogy and open educational practices.

Curation of Posts on Open Pedagogy #YearOfOpen by Maha Bali
https://blog.mahabali.me/whyopen/curation-of-posts-on-open-pedagogy-yearofopen

What is Open Pedagogy? #YearOfOpen hangout April 24
Video and transcript of different perspectives discussing the term Open Educational Practices:
https://blog.mahabali.me/whyopen/what-is-open-pedagogy-yearofopen-hangout-april-24

More information about open policies

CC Pukeko by Creative Commons New Zealand. Licensed CC-BY 4.0
Take a look at this video about schools in New Zealand implementing Creative
Commons licenses (time 3:48)

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

CC in Schools by Creative Commons New Zealand. Licensed CC-BY 4.0
More information on the implementation of Creative Commons licenses used in schools at the institutional level.
https://creativecommons.org.nz/ccinschools/

BCcampus Open Education Working Group Guide by Lucas Wright and Krista Lambert. Licensed CC-BY 4.0
A resource for librarians, staff, and faculty who support or are supporting open education at their institution and are starting or running an open working group. This resource contains three sections to help users establish, run, and sustain a working group.
https://opentextbc.ca/workinggroupguide/

OER Policy Development Tool by Amanda Coolidge and Daniel DeMarte, Institute for Open Leadership Fellows. Licensed CC-BY 4.0
An interactive tool for institutional policy development.
http://policy.lumenlearning.com/

Participant Recommended Resources

CC Certificate participants’ recommended many additional resources through Hypothes.is annotations on the Certificate website. While Creative Commons has not vetted these resources, we wanted to highlight participant’s contributions here: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccerteducomments/chapter/additional-resources-6/

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Unit 5: CC for Librarians

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5. Creative Commons for Librarians

As the role of libraries evolves and expands in our fast-changing information environment, expertise in open licensing is a crucial asset for the modern librarian.

Creative Commons licenses are the most popular open licenses among open education and open access projects around the world; CC puts the “open” in OER and OA. This unit will introduce you to the specifics of using CC licenses and CC licensed content for education and research purposes.

This unit has five sections:

5.1 Open Access to Scholarship

5.2 OER, Open Textbooks, Open Courses

5.3 Finding, Evaluating, and Adapting Resources

5.4 Creating and Sharing OER

5.5 Opening Up Your Institution

There are also additional resources if you are interested in learning more about any of the topics covered in this unit.

Please also take a moment to join the Creative Commons Open Education Platform. We need your help to identify, plan, and coordinate multi-national open education, practices, and policy projects to collaboratively solve education challenges around the world. Likewise, you may be interested in reading 5.4 (EDU): Open Pedagogy / Practices, a subchapter included in the CC Certificate for Educators Course.

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5.1 Open Access to Scholarship

Open access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Open access stands in contrast to the existing “closed” system for communicating scientific and scholarly research. This current approach is slow, expensive, and ill-suited for research collaboration and discovery. And even though scholarly research is largely produced as a result of public funding, the results are often hidden behind technical, legal, and financial barriers or paywalls. Open access publishing is an alternative model — one that takes full advantage of digital technologies, the web, and open licensing to provide free access to scholarship.

Learning Outcomes

- Define Open Access

- Explain the benefits of Open Access for your learners and for researchers at your institution

- Understand how authors can make their own works Open Access

The Big Question / Why It Matters

The purpose of scientific inquiry at the university is the fundamental search for knowledge. Teaching, the open exchange of ideas, and the process of publishing original research are all methods by which academic faculty, learners, staff, and others contribute to advancing scholarship.

How well do current information access and sharing practices within the university system reflect and support the stated goals of research and scholarship?

This unit will explore how the practice of Open Access publishing aligns with the goals of improving access to knowledge, and how librarians can support the university in implementing Open Access practices and policies.

Graphic designed by Amy Collier, copyright owned by Creative Commons. CC BY

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

How does your institution support (or not) the open publication of research? How do you interact with learners and faculty searching for academic research? Have you ever encountered a paywall while trying to access research articles?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Open Access

As defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, Open Access (OA) to research means free “availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of [research] articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution and the only role for copyright in this domain should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

Important components of the OA model include:

1. Authors keep their copyright. (we can talk about and reference author addenda).

2. Zero embargo period.

3. Share the research data with the article.

4. Add a Creative Commons license to the research article that enables text and data mining (any of the non ND licenses work, but CC BY is preferred).

See the Budapest +10 recommendations for best practices in creating, adopting and implementing OA policies and processes. For example, “when possible, funder policies should require libre OA, preferably under a CC-BY license or equivalent.”

Scholarly publishing today

First, read the Wikipedia article on scholarly communication. This article defines scholarly communication as “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. The system includes both formal means of communication, such as publication in peer-reviewed journals, and informal channels, such as electronic listservs.”

“Research Article Cycles,” by Billymeinke. CC BY 4.0.

The challenges with the existing approach to scholarly communications are laid out in the graphic above. This image explains—in generalized terms—the current process involved with developing and communicating scientific results. In the first step of the lifecycle, scientists, academics, and research institutions seek funds to conduct a variety of research. Most often this funding comes from government sources (e.g., the National Institutes of Health in the United States), although there are several philanthropic foundations (such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) that are now making major investments in particular types of research.

After the researchers have secured their grants, they conduct their experiments and collect their data. Most of the time these researchers prepare their results in the form of an academic article, which they then submit to a scholarly journal for publication. The journals then arrange for some of the submitted articles to undergo a process of peer review, in which experts within the particular topic of field will read, review, and usually provide comments on the submitted paper.

Some of the articles that pass the peer review stage are then offered for publication in the journal. The journal will notify the author that her paper has been accepted, and usually require that the author transfer copyright to (or agree to an exclusive publishing contract with) the journal. By accepting these terms, the author has granted to the journal her exclusive rights under copyright. This means that the journal—and not the author—is now the copyright holder, and thus may restrict the terms of access and reuse provided for by the bundle of rights granted to rights holders under the law.

Because journals have become the de facto rights holders to scientific research, they are also the entities in the position to license access to these materials to university libraries, research institutions, and the public—typically for a significant fee. This leads to a cyclical situation in which for-profit publishers essentially sell back access to the scientific and scholarly record that academics originally produced through public grants.

Even after a publishing embargo (usually a time of 6 months to a year when publishers retain exclusive publishing rights) expires, the access to the mostly-publicly funded scientific research remains limited, with users only permitted to read those articles (if they are properly submitted to institutional repositories). In the end, the public is left with restricted access to the publicly-funded scholarly record, and progress in the scientific enterprise doesn’t reach its maximum potential.

There are several critiques of the existing academic publishing system. SPARC has a summary of the key points on its Open Access page, some highlights of which are pasted below:

- Governments provide most of the funding for research—hundreds of billions of dollars annually—and public institutions employ a large portion of all researchers.

- Researchers publish their findings without the expectation of compensation. Unlike other authors, they hand their work over to publishers without payment, in the interest of advancing human knowledge.

- Through the process of peer review, researchers review each other’s work for free.

- Once published, those that contributed to the research (from taxpayers to the institutions that supported the research itself) have to pay again to access the findings. Though research is produced as a public good, it isn’t available to the public who paid for it.

© 2007-2017 SPARC, CC BY

As ever-increasing journal prices outpace library budgets, academic libraries are forced to make difficult decisions — often having to cancel subscriptions or shift money away from other budget items. According to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the average cost of a serial subscription for ARL member libraries increased by 315% from 1989 to 2003. Since 2003, average journal prices increased more slowly but still continue to rise about 9% per year.

Open Access Publishing

The “closed access” publishing system limits the impact of the scientific and scholarly community and progress is slowed significantly. Open Access literature is defined by scholar Peter Suber as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” Read the graphic below for a quick overview of how an open access publishing system works.

“Research Article Cycles,” by Billymeinke. CC BY 4.0.

In contrast to the earlier graphic that explained the current costly and inefficient science publishing life cycle, the image above explores an alternate path—an open access route.

The process begins just as it did in the explanation of the incumbent system—with government requests for proposals (RFPs) for research. In the open access route, RFPs contain policy language requiring research to be published in open access formats. Next, researchers conduct scientific research and prepare academic manuscripts. When submitting research articles to journals, researchers must consider the open access policy requirements of their grant funding. This means that researchers retain their copyrights instead of yielding them to for-profit publishers. Or researchers must search out a “gold” open access journal, which publishes research under liberal open access licenses (like CC BY) from the start. In either case, researchers retain some—or all—rights to their research articles, permitting them to publish under open licenses, and ensuring that they may deposit their articles in a university or institutional repository for long-term access and preservation. By publishing under open licenses, subsequent users are granted the legal permissions to access and reuse the research. This type of open access system is better aligned with the original purpose of conducting science and sharing results openly through the scholarly publishing process. Ultimately, the open access approach is more efficient, equitable, affordable, and collaborative.

Watch the Open Access Explained! Video.

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

“Open Access Explained!” Attributions: Animation by Jorge Cham Narration by Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen Transcription by Noel Dilworth Produced in partnership with the Right to Research Coalition, the Scholarly Publishing and Resources Coalition and the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students. CC BY 3.0.

Open Access Options

Open Access authors have the opportunity to publish in a few ways. The most common are known as “Green” or “Gold” Open Access.

Green OA = making a version of the manuscript freely available in a repository. This is also known as self-archiving. An example of green OA is a university research repository. OA repositories can be organized by discipline (e.g. arXiv for physics) or institution (e.g. Knowledge@UChicago for the University of Chicago).

Gold OA = making the final version of the manuscript freely available immediately upon publication by the publisher, typically by publishing in an Open Access journal and making the article available under an open license. Typically, Open Access journals charge an Article Processing Charge (APC) when an author wishes to (a) publish an article online allowing for free public access and (b) retain the copyright to the article. APCs range from $0 to several thousand dollars per article. Read more about APCs at Wikipedia. An example of a gold OA journal is PLOS.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a site that indexes open access journals, and HowOpenIsIt? (see below) is a handy tool for evaluating the relative “openness” of publishing from full open access to closed access.

HowOpenIsIt? Guide by SPARC AND PLOS. CC BY.

Certain emerging models like preprints and hubs are rapidly emerging, but they can provide a new way of considering Open Access publishing outside of the constraints of publisher-mediated models. See the additional resources section for more information about these emerging areas in Open Access publishing.

Educating authors about their publishing rights

By understanding copyright and the various scholarly publishing options, librarians can help faculty members and graduate learners navigate the system as they publish research.

Often, scholarly publishers require authors to transfer their rights to publishing companies before their research will be published in an academic journal. Academic librarians and other library departments can support faculty and student authors by helping them understand what they give up when they transfer their copyright to a publisher. For example, scholarly authors who transfer copyright could lose the ability to post their research on their own websites.

Several tools exist to help faculty and scholars understand their rights and publishing options, and to help them exercise those rights. The Termination of Transfer tool,[1] co-stewarded by Authors Alliance and Creative Commons, gives authors who have previously entered into publishing agreements information about whether and how they can regain the publication rights previously assigned away so they can publish on new terms, including under a CC license if they choose. The Scholars Copyright Addendum Engine can be used by faculty and other authors to amend publication agreements when submitting an article to a traditional publisher.[2] The engine allows authors to choose among different options to reserve rights for themselves, and generates an agreement that is then submitted with a traditional publication agreement to make that legally effective. Additionally, Authors Alliance publishes myriad resources about these tools and open access, and PLoS offers resources and articles about the benefits of open access as well.

Academic librarians can also help scholars understand how different publishing options affect the audience and prestige of their work. Impact factor is a primary metric of prominence of a journal or publication, measured by a journal’s average number of citations. Because impact factors are not necessarily a reliable metric of a journal’s importance, some publishers like Nature, are reconsidering the importance of impact factors for journals. Many Open Access scholars encourage systems like altmetrics to provide another way of thinking about impact beyond the traditional metrics. In 2017, 1Science OA- Finder released a study finding that on average, Open Access papers produce a 50% higher research impact than strictly paywalled papers. For more information, Read Jon Tennant’s article from 2016 on the academic, societal, and economic advantages of open access to learn more.

Open Access practices and policies at the university and beyond

An open access policy is a formal policy adopted by an institution to support researchers in making their work openly available. These policies can refer to published peer-reviewed articles, conference papers, and/or peer-reviewed drafts or pre-printed publications that are deposited in an institutional repository or published under open access terms in a journal. Open Access policies generally define the guidelines for how researchers can disseminate their research to maximize access. The Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROAR Map) is a registry that charts open access policies or mandates adopted by universities, research institutions, and research funders that require or request their researchers to provide open access to their peer-reviewed research article output by depositing it in an institutional repository or publish under open access terms in a journal.

Open Access advocate Peter Suber has remarked that “mandate” is not a good word for open-access policies, “…but neither is any other English word.” Without a mandate, institutions can consider faculty opt-in policies, where libraries or copyright offices focus on shifting the default publishing practice to open access.

University policies

Many universities have adopted open access policies that require university-affiliated researchers to grant to their institution a non-exclusive license to a scholarly article at the time of creation of the work. This process heads off problems with publishers downstream, since the university retains a legal right to the work before copyright is transferred to a publisher. These policies have proliferated under the assumption that universities themselves should be able to access and preserve the research outputs of their faculty. To view an example, review the University of California Open Access Policy. You can also view many other institutional open access policies in the ROARMAP, which has collected several hundred open access policies, including those of universities, research organisations, and academic institutions.

For academic librarians interested in developing an open access policy for their university or institution, the Harvard Open Access Project has developed a toolkit. Open Access policies usually originate from the Office of Scholarly Communications, but librarians in a variety of roles (outreach, reference, etc.) can help craft these policies.

Public policy

In addition to encouraging the development of open access policies at the university level, public policies can ensure that publicly funded research be made available under Open Access terms. This typically is accomplished through the inclusion of sharing requirements tied to receiving government or philanthropic grant funds. When funding cycles for research include deposit and/or open license requirements for publications, increased access and opportunities for reuse extends the value of research funding. As an example, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy requires: “… that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication…”

The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) was introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate from 2012-2017. While FASTR was introduced to U.S. Congress from 2012-2017, it has yet to be approved. Should U.S. Congress approve FASTR, it would require federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to the research articles stemming from that funded research within 6-12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The passage of FASTR would ensure that publicly-funded articles are made freely available for all potential users to read and ensure that articles can be fully used in the digital environment, enabling the use of new computational analysis tools that promise to revolutionize the research process.

Enforcing Open Access Policies

The point of most open access policies is to ensure that publicly (or foundation) funded research can be read by everyone, and is – ideally – openly licensed with a zero embargo period. When it comes to enforcing open access policies, multiple people play important roles.

The funder and its program officers need to understand the open access policy, communicate the importance of it to grantees verbally and in writing, and follow-up by checking to ensure the public has full access to the research and data under the terms of the OA policy.

The university / college administration should provide support (e.g., hire a full-time OA / OER librarian) to faculty publishing in open access journals or otherwise sharing their research openly. Institutions can also review and modify (as needed) promotion and tenure policies to ensure faculty engaged in OA publishing are rewarded (not punished) during promotion and tenure review.

Open Access Myths Debunked

For faculty and learners, Open Access can seem like a scary new world, particularly as the pressure to publish has increased. There are many guides to debunking the myths of Open Access publishing, and reading them carefully to dispel any fear or misunderstanding is crucial in the current academic landscape.

- Peter Suber’s “Field Guide to misunderstandings about Open Access”

- University of Minnesota “Myths about Open Access Publishing.”

- Mike Taylor’s “Persistent Myths about open access scientific publishing”

Final remarks

Universities play a major role in advancing scientific research, and academic publishing is a key way for faculty to communicate findings with colleagues and the public. As organizers of knowledge within institutions, librarians can work together with university researchers to promote access to information. They can do this by educating on the “how” and “why” of Open Access, answering questions about copyright, and providing guidance and recommendations to maximize the reach and impact of scholarly publishing in particular fields.

1. Currently, the Termination of Transfer tool covers U.S. copyright and contracts controlled by U.S. law only. Creative Commons is working to expand the tool to provide information and resources about provisions with similar effect around the world. ↵

2. The SCAE and the addenda are being updated by Creative Commons in 2019. ↵

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5.2 OER, Open Textbooks, Open Courses

Open education is an idea, a set of content, practices, policy, and community which, properly leveraged, can help everyone in the world access free, effective, open learning materials for the marginal cost of zero. We live in an age of information abundance where everyone, for the first time in human history, can potentially attain all the education they desire. The key to this transformational shift in learning is Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are education materials that are shared at no cost with legal permissions for the public to freely use, share, and build upon the content.

OER are possible because:

- education resources are (mostly) born digital[1] and digital resources can be stored, copied, and distributed for near zero cost;

- the internet makes it simple for the public to share digital content; and

- Creative Commons licenses make it simple and legal to retain copyright and legally share education resources with the world.

Because we can share effective education materials with the world for near zero cost,[2] many people argue that educators and governments who support public education have a moral and ethical obligation to do so. After all, education is fundamentally about sharing knowledge and ideas. Creative Commons believes OER will replace much of the expensive, proprietary content used in academic courses. Shifting to this model will generate more equitable economic opportunities and social benefits globally without sacrificing quality of education content.

Big Question / Why It Matters

Does it seem reasonable that education in the age of the internet should be more expensive and less flexible than it was in previous generations? Education is more important than ever before. Nothing else can do as much to promote happiness, prosperity, and security for individuals, families, and societies. While many interesting and useful experiments are occurring outside formal education, the degrees, certificates, and other credentials awarded by formal institutions are still critically important to the quality of life of many people around the world.

Open Educational Resources: The Education Ecosystem Comes to Life by opensourcewayCC BY-SA 2.0

Formal education, even in the age of the internet, can be more expensive and less flexible than ever. In many countries, publishers of education materials overcharge for textbooks and other resources. As part of their transition from print to digital, these same companies have largely moved away from a model where learners purchase and own books to a “streaming” model where they have access for a limited time.

Further, publishers are constantly developing restrictive technologies that limit what learners and faculty can do with the resources they have temporary access to, including inventing novel ways to prohibit printing, prevent cutting and pasting, and restrict the sharing of materials between friends.

Learning Outcomes

- Define “open” in the context of open educational resources (OER)

- Differentiate between OER, open textbooks, open courses, and MOOCs

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

What impacts have the rising costs and decreased flexibility of education materials had on you and those you know? What role do you imagine all-rights-reserved copyright and related laws have played in driving up costs and driving down flexibility for learners and teachers?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

OER and Open Textbooks

To begin, watch this video Why OER? (time 03:48)

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

“Why OER” video by The Council of Chief State School Officers. Video: CC BY 4.0 Music: The Zeppelin by Blue Dot Sessions: CC BY NC 4.0.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are: teaching, learning and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others.[3]

Or you could use this less technical definition to describe OER to someone:

OER are education materials that can be freely downloaded, edited, and shared to better serve all students.[4]

In contrast to traditional education materials, which are constantly becoming more expensive and less flexible, OER provide everyone, everywhere, free permission to download, edit, and share them with others. David Wiley provides another popular definition, stating that only education materials licensed in a manner that provide the public with permission to engage in the 5R activities can be considered OER.

The 5Rs include:

1. Retain – permission to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)

2. Reuse – permission to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

3. Revise – permission to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

4. Remix – permission to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

5. Redistribute – permission to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of to a friend)

The easiest way to confirm that an education resource is an *open* education resource that provides you with the 5R permissions is to determine that the resource is either in the public domain or has been licensed under a Creative Commons license that permits the creation of derivative works – CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, or CC BY-NC-SA.

OER comes in all shapes and sizes. A piece of OER can be as small as a single video or simulation, and can be as large as an entire degree program. It can be difficult, or at least time consuming for teachers to assemble OER into a collection comprehensive enough to replace an all rights reserved copyright textbook. For this reason, OER are often collected and presented in ways that resemble a traditional textbook in order to make them easier for instructors to understand and adopt. The term “open textbook” simply means a collection of OER that have been organized to look like a traditional textbook in order to ease the adoption process. To see examples of open textbooks in a number of disciplines, visit OpenStax,the Open Textbook Libraryor the BC Open Textbook Project. Other times, OER are aggregated and presented as digital courseware. To see examples of open courseware, visit the Open Education Consortium and MIT OCW.

In addition to demonstrating that learners save money when their teachers adopt OER, research shows that learners can have betteroutcomes when their teachers choose OER instead of education materials available under all rights reserved copyright.

The idea of OER is strongly advocated by a broad range of individuals, organizations, and governments, as evidenced by documents like the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (2007), the UNESCO Paris OER Declaration (2012), and the recently adopted UNESCO Ljubljana OER Action Plan (2017).

OER vs. Free Library Resources

Teachers and professors typically use a mix of all-rights-reserved commercial content, free library resources, and OER in their courses. While the library resources are “free” to the learners and faculty at that institution, they are (a) not “free” as the institution library has to pay to purchase or subscribe to them, and (b) not available to the general public. This chart describes the cost to learners and the legal permissions available to teachers and learners for each of these types of educational resources.

David Wiley. Slide. CC BY 4.0

OER in Primary / Secondary (K-12) vs. Tertiary (Higher Education)

OER is used in all sectors of education. How OER is produced and adopted, however, is often different depending on the level of education in which you work.

In general, tertiary (higher education) faculty are more likely to:

- have time, resources and support to produce and revise educational resources,

- own the copyright to content they create (though it depends on their contract with the college / university), and

- make unilateral decisions (see academic freedom) regarding what content is used in their courses.

As such, tertiary (higher education) faculty are often OER producers and can decide whether or not to adopt OER in their courses. OER adoption in tertiary (higher education) tends to occur one faculty member at a time. Given this opportunity, it is critical faculty be given time, resources and support for the creation and adoption of open education content and a shift to open education practices / pedagogy. Example: British Columbia Faculty wrote an Open Textbook

In general, primary / secondary (K-12) teachers are less likely to:

- have time, resources and support to produce and revise educational resources,

- own the copyright to content they create (though it depends on their contract with the school / district), and

- make unilateral decisions regarding what content is used in their curriculum.

As such, OER adoption in primary and secondary (K-12) schools tends to occur at the district or school, rather than the individual teacher level. Example: Open policies in New Zealand schools

Open Educational Resources (a very brief timeline)

While there isn’t enough space in this Certificate give a comprehensive overview of the “History of Open Education,” here are several of the pivotal events that contributed to the growth of the open education movement. (If you know of additional critical events to include, please tell us and we will update the timeline. Thanks!)

- 1969 – UK Open University opens

- 1983 – Free software movement founded with launch of GNU

- 1989 – World Wide Web

- 1997 – MERLOT

- 1998 – U.S. Copyright Term Extension Act

- 1998 – “Open content” term is coined and Open Content License released

- 1999 – Open Publication License released

- 1999 – Connexions launches (renamed OpenStax in 2012)

- 2001 – Wikipedia launched

- 2001 – Creative Commons founded

- 2001 – MIT Courseware

- 2002 – Budapest Open Access Initiative

- 2002 – Creative Commons licenses launched

- 2002 – UNESCO coined the name Open Educational Resources

- 2004 – First annual Open Education Conference

- 2005 – OpenCourseWare Consortium formed (renamed the Open Education Consortium in 2014)

- 2006 – WikiEducator

- 2007 – Cape Town OER Declaration

- 2007 – OER Commons

- 2007 – Wiley and Couros experiment with “open courses”

- 2008 – Opening Up Education published

- 2008 – Connectivism and Connected Knowledge

- > 2000 learners participated, leading to the term “massive open online course” or MOOC. Watch this video describing MOOCs:”What is a MOOC?” video (4:26) by Dave Cormier, CC BY 3.0

- 2012 – OpenStax releases first open textbook

- 2012 – UNESCO OER Paris Declaration

- 2013 – OERu launched

- 2017 – UNESCO 2nd World OER Congress

- 2018 – UNESCO drafting an OER Recommendation

Final remarks

OER, whether organized as open textbooks or opencourseware, provide teachers, learners, and others with a broad range of permissions that make education more affordable and more flexible. These permissions also enable rapid, low-cost experimentation and innovation, as educators seek to maximize access to effective educational resources for all.

1. Most OER are “born” digital, though OER can be made available to learners in both digital and printed formats. Of course, digital OER are easier to share, modify, and redistribute, but being digital is not what makes something an OER or not. ↵

2. While in many countries (like in many EU member states), cost may not be a problem, restrictive copyright and narrow fair use / fair dealing rights can limit new teaching methods. ↵

3. Creative Commons adaptation of the UNESCO OER definition: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/open-educational-resources↵

4. Drafted by OER Comms: a coalition of North American open education advocates working on OER communication: oer-comms@googlegroups.com↵

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5.3 Finding, Evaluating, and Adapting Resources

We live in a visual and vibrant culture that requires educators to provide relevant learning resources in the classroom, though finding and reusing others’ great works is not always simple.

Librarians play an important role in discovery, development, description, licensing, curation, and sharing of Open Educational Resources (OER), as well as in advocating for and supporting their use. This unit will guide you through a practical approach to supporting the adoption of OER.

Big Question / Why It Matters

What skills and knowledge are needed to find the OER your faculty and students need? If you are going to join the global open education community, find the best open resources for courses, and help faculty share their good work as OER, you need to know – and know how to teach others – how to find, evaluate, and adapt openly licensed resources. What if we want to think bigger… what effect might open education have globally?

Why is the openness, the opportunity to revise, remix and share, of content so important? If the public had access to and could creatively remix the world’s knowledge, what new opportunities might we find to address global challenges (e.g. United Nations Sustainable Development Goals)?

Cell phone by Tiago Aguiar. Public domain: CC0

Learning Outcomes

- Find OER in open repositories, Google, CC Search, and other platforms.

- Evaluate how to reuse / revise / remix the OER you find.

- Demonstrate how different OER can be used together, paying attention to license compatibility.

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

Where do you currently find and procure learning resources for your patrons? Do you seek open alternatives for materials you currently use? How do you evaluate your existing learning resources, and how can you apply those measures to openly licensed content?

Once you identify the learning resources you currently use, ask yourself the following questions:

- Is this freely available to all students?

- Can students keep a copy of this resource forever?

- Does the class have the legal rights to fix errors, update old or inaccurate content, improve the work, and share it with other educators around the world?

- Can students contribute to and improve our learning resources as part of their course work?

If the answer to these questions is “No” – you’re likely working with learning resources that don’t provide the legal permissions you and your students need to do what you want to do.

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Finding resources

Not everything on the internet is OER, and some works labeled as “open” may not have the legal permissions to exercise the 5Rs. So how do you recognize OER and how do you choose which OER will work best in your class?

Finding the resources you want to use is the first step to bringing OER into your classroom. Discovery is one of the primary barriers to educators using OER. Fortunately, there are many established ways to search for OER.

First, for a short introduction on how to find OER, watch this video “How can I find OER?” (1:31).

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

“How can I find OER?” Video by Council of Chief State School Officers, CC BY 4.0. Music by Lahaina by Blue Dot Sessions: CC BY NC 4.0

Do a quick review of OER projects and people on the OER World Map to get a sense of global OER activities

There are many websites that host large collections of OER (e.g., Wikimedia Commons), but some universities host their own OER repositories and services. A good first step is to do a general OER search using Google Advanced Search and filter your results by “Usage Rights” (pull-down menu at the bottom of the screen). See Google’s post on how to use the tool effectively.

In addition to sharing your OER on your website or blog, there are hundreds of online platforms on which you can share your openly licensed content. Creative Commons maintains a directory of some of the most popular platforms used by educators organized by content type (photos, video, audio, textbooks, courses, etc.). You can also find OER on these platforms.

Open educators often ask each other for help when looking for OER on open edu listservs. Here are a few you might want to join:

- CC Open Education Platform (invitation)

- OER Forum

- International OER Advocacy

- OER Discuss

- Open Knowledge Open Edu

- Open Edu SIG

- Wikimedia Education

- US OER Advocacy

- SPARC: Library OER

- Educause Openness

If you want to know more about most popular general options for searching for OER, read this Open Washington course module.

COMING SOON! Creative Commons is redesigning its CC Search.[1] You can play with the beta (images only) at: https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org  When the new CC Search is done, it will search the entire Commons – all of the public domain and CC licensed works on the Internet… including OER.

Evaluating resources

As with all education resources, OER need to be evaluated before use. Educators who are new to OER may have concerns about quality because OER are available for free and may have been remixed by other educators. The process of using and evaluating OER is not that different from evaluating traditional all-rights-reserved copyright resources. Whether education materials are openly licensed or closed, you are the best judge of quality because you know what your learners need and what your curriculum demands.

Subject specialists (educators and librarians) assess the quality and suitability of learning resources. JISC provides a list of criteria for assessment of quality:

- Accuracy

- Reputation of author/institution

- Standard of technical production

- Accessibility

- Fitness for purpose

And be careful not to let anyone tell you OER are “low quality” because they are free. As the SPARC OER Mythbusting Guide points out:

- In this increasingly digital and internet connected world, the old adage of “you get what you pay for” is growing outdated. New models are developing across all aspects of society that dramatically reduce or eliminate costs to users, and this kind of innovation has spread to education resources.

- OER publishers have worked to ensure the quality of their resources. Many open textbooks are created within rigorous editorial and peer-review guidelines, and many OER repositories allow faculty to review (and see others’ reviews of) the material. There is also a growing body of evidence that demonstrates that OER can be both free of cost and high quality—and more importantly, support positive student learning outcomes.

Also, be careful not to get pulled into a debate about “high or low quality education resources,” when what educators should really be concerned about is “effectiveness.” Read these two posts from David Wiley: Stop Saying “High Quality” and No, Really – Stop Saying “High Quality.”

Remixing & adapting resources

Being open enables educators to use the resource more effectively, which can lead to better learning and student outcomes. OER can be remixed and adapted: updated, tailored and improved locally to fit the needs of learners – translating the OER into a local language, adapting a biology open textbook to align it with local science standards, or modifying an OER simulation to make it accessible for a student who cannot hear.

The ideas of remix and adaptation are fundamental to education. Creative reuse of materials created by other educators and authors is about more than just seeking inspiration; we copy, adapt, and combine different materials to craft education resources for our learners.

Photo by José Carlos Cortizo Pérez. Licensed CC BY 2.0

Incorporating materials created by others and combining materials from different sources can be tricky, not only from a pedagogical perspective, but also from a copyright perspective.

Online digital education resources have different legal permissions that empower (or not) the public to use, remix and share those resources. Here are a few of those legal categories:

- Public domain works (not restricted by copyright) can be remixed with any work.

- example: Anyone can remix the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

- All-rights-reserved copyrighted works, available for free online, which you can only use under the project terms of service, or using an exception or limitation to copyright, such as fair use or fair dealing.

- example: many MOOCs allow free reuse of their content, but do not allow copying, revise, remix, or redistribution.

- All-rights-reserved copyrighted works in closed formats do not allow the public to remix or adapt a work.

- example: a blockbuster movie available only in streaming service that you cannot use or even link to.

- Creative Commons licensed works (and other free licenses) that have various permissions and restrictions.

- example: Wikipedia (BY-SA) allows you to reuse their content for commercial purposes, while WikiHow (BY-NC-SA) does not. A Wikipedia article cannot be remixed with a WikiHow article.

If you want to know which CC licensed works can be remixed with other CC licensed works, revisit the CC Remix Chart we studied in Section 4.4. Where there is a green check at the intersection of two CC licensed works, you can remix those two works. Where you see a black X, you cannot remix those two CC licensed works.

MARC records & metadata

There are metadata standards for OER that make content available for use that allows searchability, organization, and integration into current content systems at your institution. Metadata can include information such as author, title, subject area, grade level, keywords, and other categorical information.

There are many sources to easily include open textbooks in your library collection. UnGlue.it has a comprehensive database of Creative Commons ebooks. In 2014 they added 1,897 free ebooks – of those 1,076 of them have Creative Commons licenses.  They also added librarian tools to unglue.it to allow users to download and upload customizable MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) records. As free, openly licensed resources, OER often live outside of the catalog, and cataloging standards can differ between repositories. Check out the Worldcat catalog record for OpenStax to see what an OER might look like in the catalog. How do you catalog OER? Use the class chat to discuss.

Open Textbook Library and BC Campus also provide MARC bibliographic records for OER. Open Textbook Library also uses CC0 for all of their MARC records.Read more about how to use CC for MARC records.

Final remarks

We live in an amazing world of information abundance, and an increasing percentage of our digital knowledge is openly licensed. Finding the right open resources that fit the needs of your learning spaces and your learners can be a challenge. One of the major motivations for using OER is the ability to revise, remix, and share these works to best suit the needs of your learners. Search engines, OER repositories and platform services with built-in tools for using Creative Commons licenses help, but finding the right OER still takes time for your faculty and library patrons.

1. CC’s existing Search tool: https://search.creativecommons.org↵

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5.4 Creating and Sharing OER

Large parts of this course are about creation, both how it works from a legal perspective and more practically, how we learn by making and creating something. In this unit we will explore and practice how to create OER so they can have biggest impact and be used without any legal or technical barriers.

shared by: hansol. CC BY 2.0

Big Question / Why It Matters

Many people working in the field of education and library science prepare, update, and combine learning materials. Making those materials open requires just a few additional steps, and it’s easier than you think. What are those steps? What should you consider and expect when you want to recommend that someone create and publish resources in the open?

When we share our education resources as OER, we share our best practices, our expertise, our challenges and solutions. Education is about sharing. When we share our work with more people – we become better librarians and educators.

Learning Outcomes

- Imagine how your OER will work in practice.

- Understand how to select a CC license(s) for your resources.

- Examine your open license decision for compatibility (i.e., can it be remixed) with other OER.

- Identify needs and challenges to improving OER accessibility for everyone.

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

What kind of learning resources do you create now? Do you publish or share these resources with other people for feedback? Which of your resources do you think could benefit fellow educators, learners, libraries or scientists? If you choose to share, how much freedom do you want to give to others; what permissions will you allow for others to reuse your work?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Why share?

For an introduction on why it is important to share your work as OER, watch this video:

Open Education Matters: Why is it important to share content? (time 03:51)

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

“Open Education Matters: Why is it important to share content?” video by Nadia Mireles, CC BY 3.0

Because educators and librarians can share OER with everyone for near zero cost[1], we should. After all, education is fundamentally about sharing knowledge and ideas. Libraries are about archiving, sharing and helping learners find the knowledge they seek. When we CC license our work, we are sharing that work with the public under simple, legal permissions. Sharing your work is a gift to the world.

Choosing a CC license for OER

Not all education materials available under a CC license are OER. Review this chart that details which CC licenses work well for education resources and which do not.

The two CC NoDerivatives (ND) licenses are not OER-compatible licenses because they do not allow the public to revise or remix the education resource. Because the ND licenses do not meet the 5Rs or any of the major OER definitions, the open education movement does not consider ND-licensed education resources “OER.”

Choosing the right license for your OER requires you to think about which permissions you want to give to other users – and which permissions you want to retain for yourself. Read the “Open Textbook Community Advocates CC BY License for Open Textbooks” and think about why they recommend the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) for education. You can find similar text with more arguments made about this same license for publishing scientific research in “Why CC BY?” from Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

For basic information about the licenses, how to choose and apply one to your work or combined works from other people and sources, revisit Section 4.1

CC license legal cases in open education

For a detailed analysis of Creative Commons case law, see Section 3.4 “License Enforceability.” Creative Commons maintains a listing of court decisions and case law from jurisdictions around the world on its wiki.

In 2017-2018 there were two legal cases concerning open education: Great Minds vs. FedEx Office and Great Minds vs. Office Depot. Both cases involved OER used by schools for non commercial purposes. Different school districts asked FedEx and/or Office Depot to print the OER materials for use in their classrooms. The OER in question were created by Great Minds using public funds and licensed by Great Minds under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Great Minds claimed that the school districts were not allowed to engage FedEx to reproduce the materials, and that because FedEx made profit while producing the requested copies, they were violating the license. Importantly, Great Minds never alleged that the school districts’ use of the reproduced materials violated the non commercial restriction of the license. The central question in the case was whether a licensee – a school district – that is properly using the work for non commercial purposes may outsource the reproduction of the works to another who makes a profit doing so.

At the time of publication, in the FedEx case the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that a commercial copyshop may reproduce educational materials at the request of a school district that is using them under a CC BY-NC-SA license. The Office Depot case is still pending appeal.

Other considerations

Other than choosing the right CC license, what other aspects of openness and pedagogy are worth considering? Here is a list of best practices to include in your work when building OER

The Open Washington Module 8 on “Sharing OER” will give you practical advice on how to share OER online and prepare them to be used offline as well.

Encyclopedia and e-book reader on green grass by papirontul. Dedicated to the public domain using CC0

Ensuring OER is Accessible to Everyone

At its core, OER is about making sure everyone has access. Not just rich people, not just people who can see or hear, not just people who can read English – everyone.

As authors and institutions build and share OER, best practices in accessibility need to be part of the instructional and technical design from the start. Educators have legal and ethical responsibilities to ensure our learning resources are fully accessible to all learners, including those with disabilities.

Watch “Simply Said: Understanding Accessibility in Digital Learning Materials” by the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials (6:42)

An interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:

“Simply Said: Understanding Accessibility in Digital Learning Materials” by National Center on Accessible Educational Materials, CC BY 3.0.

Best practices to ensure your OER is accessible to all include:

- putting your work into the public domain (CC0) or adding a non-ND CC license to your work,

- make it simple to download your work in editable file formats, so others can modify and/or translate it to meet local needs and make it accessible, and

- most important – design your work to be accessible from the start.

Final remarks

Openness in education means more than just access or legal certainty over what you are able to use, modify, and share with your learners. Open education means designing content and practices that ensure everyone can actively participate and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. As educators and learners revise others’ OER and create and share new OER, accessibility should always be on your design checklist.

1. While in many other countries (like in many EU member states), cost may not be a problem, restrictive copyright and narrow fair use / fair dealing rights can limit new teaching methods. ↵

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5.5 Opening up Your Institution

How education institutions can support open education content, practices, and community with policy.

Photo by Stories of change, CC BY 2.0

Big Question / Why It Matters

Education institutions around the world are trying to figure out how to support their educators, staff, and learners in using, revising, and sharing OER, with new open education practices, and the communities that sustain them. How can education leaders use various policy tools to support and promote open education?

Learning Outcomes

- Consider if and why you need a policy to accomplish your open education goals

- Understand the menu of open education policy options

- Assess your existing institutional policies

- Understand how to develop an institutional open policy

Personal Reflection / Why it Matters To You

What if there were institutional policies that supported your open education and open access efforts? What effect might pro-open access and pro-open education policies have on you and your learners?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

Education institutions have a broad menu of open education policy options from which to choose.

- Raise awareness of the existence of OER and the benefits for your learners and faculty.

- Action: Host an annual “open education” day at your school or university.

- Empower stakeholders to drive your institution’s open education strategy.

- Action: Create an Open Education Task Force comprised of learners, faculty, accessibility experts, deans, bookstore, financial aid, library, instructional designers, eLearning, etc.

- Ensure all of the content you fund is OER.

- Action: Draft, adopt, and implement an open licensing policy requiring university / school funded resources to be openly licensed (preferably CC BY 4.0). Use the OER Policy Development Tool to build an open policy for your institution. You can find examples of open policies others have created at the OER Policy Registry (global) and north american OER policies and projects

- Issue a call-to-action to solve an education challenge.

- Action: Create an OER Grant Program. Appropriate funds for supporting faculty and staff to shift your 50 highest enrolled courses from closed content to OER.

- Example: The Maricopa County Community College started an open textbook initiative to lower costs of teaching materials. They provided grants to create open courses and train faculty on OER. Learn more about their process here.

- Leverage existing strategic documents to support open education.

- Action: Add open education goals to key institutional strategy documents.

- Action: Identify and track key performance indicators that improve when courses / degrees adopt OER.

- Example: Increasing student outcomes, increasing the percentage of learners who can access 100% of the learning resources on day 1, reducing dropouts during add/drop periods, increasing credits taken per semester, decreasing student debt,, decreasing time to degree.

- Make it easy to share OER.

- Action: Join a global OER repository and make it simple for your educators and learners to find others’ OER and share their OER. Provide professional development.

- Ensure educators have the legal rights to share.

- Action: Change the contract between the institution and the faculty / teachers so the educator has the legal rights to CC license their work.

- Example: A Creative Commons policy in New Zealand gives teachers advance permission to disseminate their resources online for sharing and reuse. The policy also ensures that both the school and the teacher — as well as teachers from around the country and around the world — can continue to use and adapt resources produced by New Zealand teachers in the course of their employment. Creative Commons NZ have developed an annotated policy template for schools to adapt.

- Provide OER information to learners.

- Action: Require OER Course designations in course catalogs so learners can see whether (or not) a course uses OER or an open textbook. Example: CUNY labels OER in their catalog (video).

- Reward sharing.

- Action: Adjust promotion and tenure policies to reward the creation / adoption / maintenance of OER and publishing in Open Access journals. The creation and adaptation of OER should be appropriately recognized as curricular innovation and service to the academic profession during promotion and tenure review.

Enforcing Open Education Policies

The point of most open education policies is to ensure the publicly (or foundation) funded educational resources are available to the public with 5Rs permissions. When it comes to enforcing open education policies, many people play important roles.

The funder and its program officers need to understand the open policy, communicate the importance of it to grantees verbally and in writing, and follow-up by checking to ensure the public has full access to the openly licensed content under the terms of the policy.

The university / college administration should provide support (e.g., hire a full-time OER / OA librarian) to faculty creating, remixing, sharing and adopting OER, and/or redesigning their courses toward open pedagogy / practices. Institutions can also review and modify (as needed) promotion and tenure policies to ensure faculty engaged in open education work are rewarded (not punished) during promotion and tenure review.

Final remarks

When education institutions support their educators, staff, and learners in moving from closed to open content and practices, open education thrives. Educators want to design the best courses, adjust their practices and pedagogy to empower learners to co-create knowledge, and push the limits of knowledge by openly sharing their ideas and resources with a global audience. But educators can’t do it alone. They need political, financial, time, staff, and policy support to shift to, and fully realize, the benefits of open education.

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Additional Resources

A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access by Peter Suber

- A short description defining open access, research articles, open access repositories, archives, and journals (places where open access content is shared)
http://api.ning.com/files/JOi7zGa2fuzuS*bGstF4DkFDsquoaB8WAHtxNzkKpmGEJcUtvbArAaUG56hLkiZaT3jSnZf354VW573zjj25qhlUnRcN6POA/AverybriefintroductiontoOpenAccessA4.pdf

OER and Advocacy: What Can Librarians Do? By University of Toronto Libraries

- Resources and information regarding how librarians can support OER adoption as well as some faculty perspectives on OER
https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/c.php?g=448614&p=3199145

Open Access Overview by University of Minnesota Libraries

- An introduction to open access, specifically how it pertains to librarians. Provides additional resources and information from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) about open access for librarians
https://www.lib.umn.edu/openaccess/open-access-overview

Open Access Publishing: A New Model Based on Centuries of Tradition by University of Washington Libraries

- A brief introduction to open access publishing for librarians including supplementary links to related guides for librarians regarding open access support
http://guides.lib.uw.edu/research/spoa

Open Access Publishing by Berkeley Library Scholarly Communication Services

- Information on open access, funding, and how open access scholarship fits into the framework of academic publishing
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarly-communication/publishing/open-access-publishing

Academic Libraries and Open Access By Aaron Tay

- A substantial discussion regarding how open access publishing fits into the space of academic publishing at large and current issues surrounding open access
https://medium.com/a-academic-librarians-thoughts-on-open-access/academic-libraries-in-a-mixed-open-access-paywall-world-can-we-substitute-open-access-for-d30fa182cafd

Removing the Barriers to Research: An Introduction to Open Access for Librarians by Peter Suber

- A detailed description of open access for librarians that digs into some of the deeper logistics of how open access publishing works in practice
https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/acrl.htm

Open access: The true cost of science publishing by Richard Van Noorden

- A discussion about the ethics of publishing, including how open access quells some of
these ethical issues and the practicality of free access to journals
https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676

We’ve failed: Pirate black open access is trumping green and gold and we must change our approach by Toby Green

- A discussion of current issues in the realm of open access publishing and prescriptions
of how to make improvements to current models
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/leap.1116/full

Open Access Overview: Focusing on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints by Peter Suber CC BY 3.0

- Article providing definitions, initiatives, and discussion surrounding open access,
including discussions regarding journals, repositories, cost models, and public interest
https://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? By Stephen Buranyi

- Article discussing the ethics of the traditional academic publishing model and its impact
on the propagation of new research and scientific discovery
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science

Understanding Open Access: When, Why, & How to Make Your Work Openly Accessible by Lexi Rubow, Rachael Shen, & Brianna Schofield at the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic CC BY 4.0

- An in-depth overview of open access and how to make your own work openly
accessible
https://authorsalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/Documents/Guides/Authors%20Alliance%20-%20Understanding%20Open%20Access.pdf

More information about Open Access and OER advocacy

ROAR: Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policy by The School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton

- A review of existing open access policies including terms and details

- http://roarmap.eprints.org/981/

OER and Advocacy: What Can Librarians Do? By University of Toronto Libraries

- Resources and information regarding how librarians can support OER adoption as
well as some faculty perspectives on OER

- https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/c.php?g=448614&p=3199145

Scholarly Communication Toolkit: Scholarly Communication Overview by Advancing Learning Transforming Scholarship at the Association of College & Research Libraries

- A toolkit to help librarians integrate a scholarly communication perspective into library
operations and programs, as well as prepare presentations on scholarly
communication issues for administrators, faculty, staff, students, or other librarians
http://acrl.libguides.com/scholcomm/toolkit/

More information about emerging models of Open Access publishing

Open In Order To…Accelerate Research and Scientific Discoveries by Timothy Vollmer CC BY 4.0

- Article about the value of open access based on a recap of a Creative Commons Slack
chat about the importance of preprints for open access publishing
https://creativecommons.org/2017/10/25/open-order-accelerate-research-scientific-discoveries/

Q&A with PLOS co-founder Michael Eisen by Richard Poynder

- An interview with Michael Eisen about the costs and futures of open access publishing

- https://poynder.blogspot.ca/2017/10/q-with-plos-co-founder-michael-eisen.html

Participant Recommended Resources

CC Certificate participants’ recommended many additional resources through Hypothes.is annotations on the Certificate website. While Creative Commons has not vetted these resources, we wanted to highlight participant’s contributions here: https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccerteducomments/chapter/additional-resources-7/