Open Education Resources (OERs) are designed to be used, edited, and re-used to create the perfect, free content for your course. These resources exist on a spectrum of how open they are, which is where Creative Commons comes into play. Creative Commons licenses illustrate how 'open' the resource is, by proclaiming what can be done with the resource. At its simplest, all creative commons licenses allow you to take an OER resource and use it as-is within your class; whether that involves linking to the resource or including the file as an upload.
With most OERs, you can also edit, alter, or even take from them to create entirely new OER resources. Most of the time you'll be required to provide attribution to the source that you took from, just like you would when writing a paper. The only time you cannot alter an OER resource is if it uses 'ND' in its Creative Commons license. ND stands for 'no derivatives'; but this runs contrary to the purpose of OER and will only be found in a small minority of OER materials.
When you, as an author, create something, you automatically have five core rights over that product:
Publishers and other scholars cannot legally exercise those rights, in relation to your work, unless you agree to let them. Creative Commons offers the vehicle for allowing other scholars to use, edit, and distribute your work.
Almost all Creative Commons licenses require attribution. CC BY is the most common license term, BY meaning that you need to provide attribution to the source if you re-use someone's information. When providing attribution to someone else's OER work, you should ideally include four elements:
This can be fairly simple. Here is a clean, easy example of an ideal attribution:
Example: "Physical Geography” by K. Allison Lenkeit-Meezan is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.
Creative Commons licenses are free copyright licenses that creators can use to indicate how they'd like their work to be used. Creators can choose from a set of licenses with varying permissions, from the most open license (CC0) to the least open license (CC BY-NC-ND). The license most commonly used by educators tends to be the CC BY license (can distribute, remix, and adapt so long as you give credit).
In a Creative Commons license, each pair of letters denotes specific meanings:
See list and image below for the range of licenses. Click on each license name for a complete description of the terms & uses of each CC license.
Get more information about Creative Commons licenses.
Terms of use: Content created by Creative Commons, originally published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Generally, you can combine sources with different Creative Commons licenses; however, there are specific ways to do this. LibreTexts automatically imports licenses for different sections when they are combined from their titles, which can help; but you need a basic understanding of how it works.
There are two key questions to address about the work you are creating, based on how you're using the other sources:
If you are combining information from multiple sources with no clear delineation of where one starts and the other ends (for instance, combining information into the same chapter), then you are remixing. Remixing and/or editing content creates derivative works, which limits the license you can use on the work you're creating.
If, however, you keep different sources as completely separate sections (even if you make your own edits to create a derivative work), you can use any license that you want on your final product because you are creating a collection. You just need to specify that your final work's license applies "...except where noted". You then need to showcase each source work's license on its chapter/section, and avoid combining any of those sources together so that it is very clear what license applies to each chapter or section.
For remixes, in general practice, you have to use the most restrictive license from one of the materials you've used to combine into your source. If an item is licensed CC BY, then you just have to ensure whatever license you use includes CC BY.
If you include a book that uses CC BY NC, then you have to use a CC license that also includes CC BY NC. That could include CC BY NC SA, or CC BY NC, etc.