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Open Access and Open Educational Resources: Types of Creative Commons Licenses

The Licenses

CC BY License Image   Attribution (CC BY): 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 licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.


CC BY SA License Image   Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA): This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open-source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.


CC BY ND License Image   Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND): This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.


CC BY NC License Image   Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC): This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.


CC BY NC SA License Image   Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA): 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 identical terms.


CC BY ND License Image   Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND): This license is the most restrictive of the six 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.

Note that every CC license except the non-derivative license allows for modifications!

 

This material is from SUNY OER Services, which is available at https://online.suny.edu/sunyoercommunitycourse/understanding-oer/customizing-and-integrating-oer/ This material is adapted from the following works:

This content is adapted from the following works:

“Find OER” by Open Education Consortium, licensed under CC BY 4.0
“OER Mythbusting” is licensed under CC BY 4.0
“A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources” by Neil Butcher, UNESCO is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.