Support Role 6.3: Open Licenses
Media Developers 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 But it will not be published under all-rights-reserved copyright.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 lets future users know what permissions they have to reuse, revise, and share your work with attribution. The open license you choose will be specified in your Statement of Work.
An open license sits on top of the copyright for a document and specifies what can and cannot be done with a work. It grants permissions and states restrictions. Broadly speaking, an open license is one that grants permission to do what David Wiley calls the “5 R’s” [Website]:
- Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
- Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
- Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
- Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
- Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
Figure 1 shows several differences between all-rights-reserved and openly licensed content.
| When you are… | All-rights-reserved copyright: | Open license added: |
|---|---|---|
| Creating original content | Copyright is automatically granted at the moment of creation – no further steps needed | Copyright holder adds an open license to let future users know which permissions are granted |
| Communicating with downstream users | Copyright holder may give permission for certain uses (this can take a long time) | Copyright holder specifies permission in advance for certain uses of their work (shortcut!) |
| Reusing content | Future users can make a fair use argument for educational reuse without the copyright holder’s permission | Future users already have permission to reuse all the content under the terms of the open license |
There are many open licenses developed for different areas of knowledge. When it comes to open educational resources, the most common open licenses used are Creative Commons [Website] licenses. Our preference is for you to apply a Creative Commons license to your work, but this is not a requirement if other open licenses better meet your needs.
How to Add an Open License to Your Work
You can see exactly how to write a license statement for original work in the Attribution Style Guide [Website].
It’s important to share your open license in a way that the information won’t be accidentally separated from the media you created. For example, you can add an open license to video metadata AND to the title slide or closing credits of the video itself. For images, you can include the attribution statement with your deliverable via email AND incorporate the information into the image you create.
Figure 2, below, shows how a Media Developer in this project has added an open license to her work. This is a complex image that requires both alt text and a long description, which we include below the image.
Figure 2 is a complex image that requires alt text as well as an image description. The alt text is short, summarizing the visual information with a sentence:
A vibrant flower with different social identities on each petal and a center labeled ‘Intersecting Social Identities.’ Image Description Available.
The image description provides additional necessary detail, including the open license information:
A vibrant, rainbow-toned flower with different social identities marked on each petal, including: Neurodiversity, Body size, Ability, Gender, Sexuality, Sex, Race, Ethnicity, Age, Socioeconomic status, Nationality, Culture, Religion, Geography, First Language, and Heath. Each petal intersects at the flower’s center, which is labeled “Intersecting social identities.” Creators Elizabeth Pearce and Michaela Willi Hooper are noted along with the CC BY Creative Commons license.
As sighted users see this information associated with the image, it is appropriate for the image description to convey this information as well.
Using Open Content
If you find content that is already openly licensed, or in the public domain, then you have permission to adapt it as long as you provide attribution to the original content creator. We welcome your use of existing open content, with attribution, in this project.
The Attribution Style Guide [Website] provides examples of how to attribute common types of content. Expand the table of contents at the top of this website to navigate through the page.
Attribution statements have four parts. These include:
- Title (when available)
- Author or creator (when available)
- Source (link or URL), and
- Licensing or copyright information
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. The most likely changes you’ll make are adding notes about how you modified the work. You can see examples of modification notes in the Attribution Style Guide [Website].
Figure 3, below, shows how a Media Developer remixed open images to create an original infographic, and attributed the reused content in the license statement in the image itself. This is a complex image that requires both alt text and a long description, which we include below the image.
Figure 3 is a complex image that requires alt text as well as an image description. The alt text is short, summarizing the visual information with a sentence:
Infographic shows the different facilities that make up the U.S. incarceration system. Image Description Available.
The image description provides additional necessary detail, including the open license information:
Three steps in the incarceration process
The first step is being accused. A person is accused of a crime by county, state, or local law enforcement. A SWAT team in helmets and bulletproof vests is pictured. A person can also be accused by a federal agency, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the U.S. Marshals Service; Homeland Security; the Secret Service; the Bureau of Indian Affairs; the Inspector General’s Office; the Fish and Wildlife Service; or the Internal Revenue Service. Federal agents with guns and walkie talkies are pictured.
The second step is going to jail. Jails house people not convicted of a crime, awaiting sentencing, or serving shorter sentences (less than one year). Persons pending charges are incarcerated, meaning they don’t have access to the community. Convicted people with longer terms are sent to prison after sentencing. A sparse jail cell is pictured with a bunk bed, chair, and locker.
The third step is imprisonment. People may be imprisoned in either a federal prison run by the Bureau of Prison, which houses people convicted of a crime by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. They may also be housed in a state prison, where people convicted of a crime at the state level by a District Attorney’s Office go. There is a picture of a federal prison with guard towers and a state prison, which is a collection of nondescript cement buildings.
Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility by Don Ramey Logan is CC BY 4.0. Public domain photos by ATF.gov, Spc. Tanya Van Buskirk for the US Army, and BOP.gov. This infographic is designed by Kendra Harding and Michaela Willi Hooper, Open Oregon Educational Resources is CC BY 4.0.
Licenses and Attributions for Open Licenses
Open content, original
“Open Licenses” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Open content, shared previously
“Open Licenses” is modified from “Understanding the basics of OER” by Amy Hofer for Open Oregon Educational Resources, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
“How to Add an Open License to Your Work” is adapted from Attributions: Giving Credit by Michaela Willi Hooper, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Figure 2. “Intersecting Social Identities” by Elizabeth Pearce and Michaela Willi Hooper is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
