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You can’t beat the creative and editorial control that comes with self-production and open publishing. — Ralph Morelli, Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus, Trinity College. Author of Java, Java, Java: Object-Oriented Problem Solving (CC BY).
Conceptually, open educational resources are not new. Education is about sharing, and many of us have shared lessons, worksheets, and activities with colleagues. Yet it is a paradigm shift to think about using predominantly openly licensed materials, especially textbooks, because most teachers and faculty use a purchased or supplied textbook.
What does it mean to use, adapt and create an openly licensed resource?
Copyright
Copyright. In this day and age where technologies abound and are often tied to large amounts of money, we hear the term a lot. We are used to seeing the little © logo everywhere.
- Copyright is a legal protection that grants someone, often the creator, exclusive rights to use and distribute works. A copyright is a way to protect ‘original works of authorship’ that are in some way tangible, be them published or unpublished. Think of literature, music, and motion pictures.
- Copyright is different from patents, which are for a physical invention, discovery or original method of accomplishing something. Copyright is also different from trademarks, which are nearly always related to visuals, logos, slogans or a combination.
- Copyright protects works and limits sharing. Works with copyright typically are ‘all rights reserved’.
Copyright laws vary from country to country. Further reading on copyright in the U.S.: http://copyright.lib.harvard.edu
Creative Commons
The most common way to share materials as OER is by applying a Creative Commons (CC) license. The CC licenses are standardized, free to use open copyright licenses, and have been adopted by millions of people around the world. You can add a Creative Commons license (creativecommons.org) to your work without any fees, paperwork, or registration.
You’ve also probably seen Creative Common licenses on some materials; there are over 1.2 billion of them online. So, how do copyright and Creative Commons work together?
- Creative Commons licenses work in parallel with copyright, not separately. An author can retain copyright and license their work with a Creative Commons license.
- A Creative Commons license is a way to assign rights about how works can be shared and modified by the public. This can be thought of as ‘some rights reserved.’
- Works that have no ownership, or that the creator has instead chosen to make completely open, become part of the public domain. They have ‘no rights reserved’ (CC0).
Creative Commons Licenses Explained
The following information about Creative Commons license types is from https://creativecommons.org/licenses
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 accommodat