In the first section of this unit you read about what open licenses are. Now we’re going to get very specific about what open licenses mean for your work on this project.

Copyright and Licenses in this Project

Authors in the Open Curriculum Project retain the copyright to their own work. But it will not be published under all-rights-reserved copyright. You’ll choose an open license that will sit on top of your copyright and let future users know what permissions they have to reuse, revise, and share your work with attribution. That’s what makes it an open educational resource.

As an open educational resource author, you are sharing your expertise and unique perspective on teaching your course content. Your expertise and perspective are also valuable in determining when to bring in other authors to contribute chapter sections, case studies, multimedia, or other lived experiences.

The more familiar you are with your background scan, the better you will be able to fill a gap in existing materials for your course. When you decide to reuse open content from your background scan, you will still be creating an original work because of the way you organize the material, present the concepts, draw on sources and examples, and combine the content.

Whenever you write original content, you will also write a license statement to tell future users how to attribute your work. You can see exactly how to write a license statement for original work in the Attribution Style Guide [Website]. It’s easiest to write your license statements as you go along and it will quickly become a new habit.

Please give this a try right now! Add a license statement to your {Course #} About This Book document under the header “Licenses and Attributions for {Course #} About This Book.” Even if others on your author team have already added a license statement, go ahead and write your own. When your team meets this week, you can discuss any differences or questions that you have. (Then you can delete the extras!) Openly licensing your document meets an Oregon Context criteria for success: Copyright restrictions are minimized so that downstream users (your colleagues) have permission to revise, remix, and share forward.

The next sections are all about reusing existing open content in your own work. We’ve worked with enough authors to recognize that for some people, writing is how they think. If this is you, then you’re a writer who relies on the writing process to fully capture what you want to say. Go ahead and write! But don’t worry about writing perfectly – in fact, go fast. If you discover that some of what you need already exists, you can save time by reusing the existing work instead of polishing up what you drafted.

Giving Credit with Citations and Attributions

As academics, we have learned indelible lessons about plagiarism. Adapting open content requires a major shift in mindset because the content creator has given you permission to copy, paste, and edit their work, as long as you provide attribution back to the original source. We show you exactly how to do this below.

First we want to address a very common question: Isn’t it plagiarism to reuse and reproduce someone else’s work? In general, yes. But when people publish their work with an open license, they give permission for others to reuse their work with attribution.

Attribution has a lot in common with the familiar concept of citation. Both citation and attribution give credit to others. However, citation and attribution have different purposes. Because they serve different purposes, you cannot replace one with the other, even though they have similar rules and parts. The table in figure Y1 2.4 offers a side-by-side comparison, which we can also summarize in the statements below:

• Citations have an academic purpose. They tell your reader where ideas that you quote, paraphrase, or summarize, came from. A citation says to the reader: “I base my thinking on this other person’s work, which you can find by following my citation.”
• Attributions have a legal purpose. Writing an attribution statement is a legal requirement of reusing openly licensed works. An attribution says to the reader: “I have permission to reuse this other person’s work, which you can find by following my attribution.”

It is likely that your open textbook chapters will have both a licenses and attributions list at the end of each section, and a reference list at the end of each chapter. This meets one of the Representation of Diverse Voices criteria for success because accurate citations and attribution statements give credit to your sources.

Writing an Attribution

All images, text, and other content that you did not create (unless it is a short quote in quotation marks, in which case you’ll write a reference list entry) should have an attribution. This section walks through the basics of writing an attribution.

The Attribution Style Guide [Website] is your go-to resource. It provides examples of how to attribute common types of content. There is an expandable table of contents at the top of the page so that you can easily jump to the section you need.

Our attribution style is based on the WA Open Attribution Builder [Website], which you can use to easily generate attributions for open content. When you copy/paste from the Attribution Builder, check your attribution against the Attribution Style Guide [Website] and make any adjustments needed.

Attribution statements have four parts. These include:

• Title (when available)
• Author or creator (when available)
• Source (link or URL), and
• Licensing or copyright information.

To help you remember each part of an attribution, we use the mnemonic TASL (pronounced like tassel, or the fringe that you might find on the end of a scarf or shawl). This catchy acronym can also be used as a verb: Please TASL your attributions!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abmgUwvV86M

Modifying an Attribution Statement

The most likely changes you’ll make to your attribution statements are adding information about how you modified the work, or where the work appears in your chapter.

If you changed someone’s work (edited, shortened, expanded, etc.), it’s a best practice to note these adaptations or modifications at the end of your attribution. Please capture your notes right away! Experience tells us that authors are unlikely to remember what modifications they made when they come back to their chapter later. You can see examples of modification notes in the Attribution Style Guide [Website].

It’s also a good practice to note where the attributed content appears in your chapter. You will need to add this information (usually a figure number or subsection title) so that future users will know what part of your work is built on an adapted work.

For example, the following attribution is copied directly from the Open Attribution Builder:

“Photo” by Aziz Acharki is licensed under the Unsplash License.

Here is the image with a figure number and figure caption (figure Y1 2.6). Note that the attribution is not used as a figure caption. That’s because for this project, figure captions point out the relevance of an image to the chapter’s larger argument and often pose a question or invite students to make a connection to their own lives (we discuss this in more depth in Unit 8). Instead, the attribution is added to the Licenses and Attributions list associated with the chapter section that includes the image.

The entry in the Licenses and Attributions section can be revised to say:

Figure Y1 2.6. “Photo” by Aziz Acharki is licensed under the Unsplash License. Modified by Open Oregon Educational Resources to add alt text.

Using Open Content

One of your tasks for this unit is to go through the second half of the open content in your background scan (you started this in Unit 1). As you scan these open materials, you will start copying and pasting sections that you think you’ll use in your book. Here’s what we want you to do in order to:

1. Save time – no need to reinvent the wheel.
2. Avoid an emergency later – track all your sources as you go along.

Get started right now! Follow these steps to practice using and attributing open content.

First, open your {Course #} Parking Lot document. When you find openly licensed work that you might want to use, write a header that names the topic, then copy and paste the content under the header. Highlight the text you want to use and copy it (we recommend the keyboard shortcut control-C). In your document, paste the text where you want it to go (we recommend the keyboard shortcut control-shift-V to paste without formatting, with the caveat that you’ll also lose italics, links, etc.).

Right away, before you do anything else, use the WA Open Attribution Builder [Website] and the Attribution Style Guide [Website] to write an attribution for the open content you just pasted. Do this at the end of the pasted content.

1. Fill in, at minimum, the title, author, source, and license information in the WA Open Attribution Builder [Website].
2. Copy and paste the attribution that the builder generated.
3. Check the Attribution Style Guide [Website] for recommendations about edits to the attribution based on the kind of content you are attributing.

You can use the comment feature in Google Docs to tag the Research Consultant on the first attributions you write to make sure you are doing it correctly. If you have questions, bring them to your standing team meeting.

Just like you tell students to do their citations as they go along to avoid an emergency right before the paper is due – write your attributions as you go along so that we can share your work feeling confident that we’re giving credit where it’s due. The first few attributions might feel confusing, but with practice they will get easier to write.

Licenses and Attributions for Creating Open Educational Resources

Open content, original

“Creating Open Educational Resources” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Open content, shared previously

“Giving Credit with Citations and Attributions” is adapted from Citations vs Attributions by Amy Hofer for Open Oregon Educational Resources, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 international license. It was adapted from Citations vs. Attributions by Quill West, Open Education Project Manager, Pierce Community College, CC-BY 4.0.

“Writing an Attribution” is adapted from Attributions: Giving Credit by Michaela Willi Hooper, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Figure Y1 2.5. Clip from Awesome Attributions and Lovely Licensing Statements: How OER Practitioners Can Use Creative Commons Licenses With Style and Substance is by Jonathan Poritz for Open Oregon Educational Resources and is licensed CC-BY 4.0.

Figure Y1 2.6. “Photo” by Aziz Acharki is licensed under the Unsplash License. Caption by Kimberly Puttman in Inequality and Interdependence: Social Problems and Social Justice is licensed CC-BY 4.0.