OER and Open Licenses

As generally defined, OERs are educational materials that are freely available and licensed to allow broad redistribution. To encourage this broad redistribution, OER creators often apply Creative Commons licenses to their materials which indicate such reuse is allowed. Creative Commons licenses allow creators of original works to waive some of the rights reserved under standard copyright.

The following chart visually explains the various permissions each Creative Commons licenses grants.

Image details the permissions of the 6 creative commons licenses. Creative Commons licenses work as "some rights reserved" rule instead of "all rights reserved" rule. Creative Commons offer a divers set of license conditions — the freedoms and limitations. This allows the author to define rules on which he or she would like to share his or her creations with others. At the same time, users gain more rights to the use of his or her works. Creative Commons operates not for profit, and all of their licenses and tools are available for free. CC-BY (Attribution 3.0 license): This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of the licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ CC BY-SA (Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license): This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This license is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content for Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ CC BY-NC (Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license): This license lets other remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be noncommercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ CC BY-ND (Attribution-No Derivs 3.0 license): This license allows for redistribution, commercial and noncommercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and whole, with credit to you. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license): This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivs 3.0 license): This license is the most restrictive of Creative Commons’ 6 main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

“CC License Poster” by Piotrek Chuchla used under CC BY 3.0 PL / Color coding added to original