Open Educational Resources (OER)

OERs are not copyright-free. Instead, they are available for use under Creative Commons or similar open licenses. These licenses grant permission to Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute resources.

There are six creative commons licenses:

These licenses are comprised of a combination of four features:

BY = Attribution
You may distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work but must credit the author

NC = Non-Commercial
You may only use the work for non-commercial purposes

SA = Share-Alike
You must license your revised or remixed work under the identical terms

ND = No Derivatives
You are free to use and distribute the work but may not revise or remix it

Read more about Creative Commons Licenses.

Visit our Copyright Guide to learn more about copyright at Red Deer Polytechnic.

"Open Licensing and Creative Commons" is an Opening Up Copyright module created by the University of Alberta (CC-BY 4.0).

Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) and Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike (CC BY-SA) licenses are recommended by UNESCO for Open Educational Resources.

These two licenses are called free or fully opened license. Free licenses are a kind of agreement between an author/copyright holder and the rest of the universe. In this arrangement the intellectual property rights stay attached to the creator, but in the same time the author is able to (under some simple to define conditions) agree on:

• making unlimited copies of the work,
• unlimited distribution of the work, also for commercial purposes,
• adaptation of the work (derivative works).

Created by OER Mythbusting (CC-BY)