0.5 Oer licensing and conditions of use  (Page 2/4)

Using a Creative Commons license does not mean you are giving up rights to copyrighting your work. This short overview explains the four main licensing conditions and provides scenarios to illustrate how the licenses are used. To further understand Creative Commons licensing, read descriptions of the six main licenses .

Figure 1: Creative Commons comic defining the spectrum of possibilities for copyrighting material. From: (External Link)

Before submitting your materials to OER Commons, and before deciding on a license, Creative Commons recommends you make sure that:

• a Creative Commons license can be applied to the type of work you want to license
• you understand how Creative Commons licenses operate
• you have the rights for the material
• you are specific about what you are licensing
• if you a member of a collecting society, you are allowed to use a Creative Commons license.

Read more about what Creative Commons has to say about the above recommendations.

After ensuring you can use a Creative Commons license for your material, you are ready to take the next step in licensing it. During the process of submitting your material to OER Commons, you will be asked two questions to help determine which license is most appropriate for your needs. Figure 2 is a visual representation of the Creative Commons licensing form. You will see this form during the process of submitting your material to OER Commons—it appears as a link on the OER Commons submission form.

Figure 2. Visual representation of the form you will see when you complete the OER Commons submission form.

Look at this example to see how a Creative Commons license is displayed for an item in OER Commons. On this page you will see an icon that represents the chosen Creative Commons license as well as a link to the license. In this instance the author chose the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Let’s break down what each of these words mean:

• Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• Noncommerical: You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
• Share-Alike: If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.
• 3.0: the version of this license.
• Unported: the license has not been adapted for a local jurisdiction.

With this particular item, the author chose a license that allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the work as well as remix it, which means you can adapt the work for your own use.

If you’d like more information about Creative Commons’Version 3 license, read a brief explanation by their General Counsel.

Using others’Work

Before using someone else’s material you found in OER Commons, check the material’s licensing. This information can be found on the item’s overview page in the section called“Conditions of Use.”A link to the license is provided; the license will describe how the material’s author has specified the way it can be used.