From the beginning of this project, we’ve encouraged all authors to capture attribution information while you’re writing (as you do with citations). Just like you tell students to do their citations as they go along to avoid an emergency right before the paper is due, we recommend that you 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.

In reality, it’s very likely that you have reached this stage of the project with some attribution work left undone. Here are some common reasons that this happens:

• Preparing your manuscript for pilot at the end of Year 1 took priority
• Writing attributions is not the fun part (too confusing, too boring, too time-consuming, etc)
• Not understanding that this is a project requirement.

If this describes you – or if there is any other reason you’re behind on writing attributions – that’s OK! This unit is where we will make sure that this important part of your project is taken care of. We start with a reminder of the underlying concepts and provide step-by-step instructions at the end of this section so that you have all the information you need to complete Step 2.

Purpose of Attributions

As we explained in Year 1, Unit 2, 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 grants permission to do what David Wiley calls the “5 R’s”: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute (Wiley, n.d.).

When it comes to open educational resources, the most common open licenses used are Creative Commons licenses. All Creative Commons licenses include the requirement to provide attribution back to the source when you reuse content with one of their licenses. Like the academic practice of citation, attributions give credit to your source.

Attributions, however, have a legal purpose because they are required by the Creative Commons license. 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.”

If you use someone else’s openly licensed work without attribution, you are violating the open license. Open Oregon Educational Resources will not publish your chapters if we find that they are significantly missing attributions where they are needed.

Attributions are Authors’ Work

Can someone else do your attributions for you? The answer is, as usual, that it depends.

Often time and memory are barriers for authors if they leave attributions and citations for the last minute. One solution is to keep short notes on what existing content you’ve used and where it came from. Without your notes, no one else can go back through your chapters and know what is original content that you wrote, and what is copy/pasted from another source and needs attribution. Often authors will end a work session by taking 15 minutes to note the sources used in that chapter or passage. At an absolute minimum, you must identify reused content in some way – whether with a comment in the document, a bracketed note before or after a paragraph, or some other way of showing what came from where. Only you can do this!

If you have met this minimum and need assistance, another solution is to ask the support team if there is time and money to cover the cost of another team member or a student worker to write or revise your attributions.

The same is true for citations. If you’ve kept track of where your information comes from, we may be able to provide you with support to format and alphabetize your reference lists, or cross-check that all in-text citations correspond to reference list entries.

Attribution How-To

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 that includes:

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

The Attribution Style Guide [Website] provides examples of how to attribute common types of content. The style used is based on the WA Open Attribution Builder [Website], which you can use to easily generate attributions for open content.

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

We recommend that you use the WA Open Attribution Builder [Website] and the Attribution Style Guide [Website] to write your attributions. Follow these steps:

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

Your chapter may reuse or cite content from other forthcoming books in this cohort. If you use prepublication content, please:

• Check with the person whose unpublished work you’re using to make sure that you have the most current version and that it is OK to use.
• Note the licensing information, make sure it’s compatible with the section where it appears in your own book, and copy over any relevant attributions and citations.
• Check with the Project Manager for the launch URL when you write your attribution.

Each H2 section ends with an H3 section titled “Licenses and Attributions for {Name of Section}.” All of your attribution statements belong here. Systematically review these sections for organization, completeness, consistency, and license compatibility, as described below.

There is an example of a “License and Attribution” at the end of every section of this training. Please browse a few and ask the Project Manager if you have any questions.

Organization

• Ensure there is a Licenses and Attributions section at the end of each H2 section.
• Title (H3): Licenses and Attributions for {H2 Section Name}.
• Sections (H4) if you are including more than one source:
  • Open Content, Original
    • Note: If you wrote the entire section yourself and didn’t include any content from an external source (unlikely), you’re done. A single attribution doesn’t need to be under an H4.
  • Open Content, Shared Previously
  • All Rights Reserved Content
• Order within section: text first, then images. Within these categories, you can arrange by order of appearance in the text, or alphabetically – just be consistent per book.
• Note: You will almost always start with “Open Content, Original” and write a license statement for the section giving credit to yourself and adding the open license you’ve chosen for your work. The exception is if you primarily modified other open content for an entire section.

Completeness

• Each attribution or license should include a way to locate the content, for example a figure number (e.g., Figure 1.1) or a section title (in quotation marks).
• Each attribution should include:
  • Title (when available)
  • Author or creator (when available)
  • Source (link or URL), and
  • Licensing or copyright information.
• Each attribution for an adapted rather than copied work should indicate how the work was modified.

Consistency

• Ensure team members’ names are consistent.
• Ensure that Creative Commons licenses are linked and standardized (examples: CC BY 4.0; CC BY-SA 4.0).
• Use the Attribution Style Guide [Website] for examples for licenses and copyright status other than Creative Commons (examples: Public Domain, Unsplash/Pixabay photos, YouTube videos, fair use, all rights reserved, etc.).

License compatibility

• If a text with a CC BY-NC-SA or CC BY-SA license was remixed, then the overall section (which is a web page in Pressbooks) should carry this same license. “SA” stands for “Share Alike.”
  • If you remix text where some content comes with a CC BY-NC-SA license and some content comes from a CC BY-SA license, make sure to mark which sections have which licenses.
  • Exception: If just a key term definition has an SA license, you can still license the section it appears in CC BY.
• If the overall H2 section license is not CC BY (due to compatibility or author choice), add this markup under the section title (the section title is the H2 for the section): [license]specify license using exact spelling and punctuation from list below[/license]
  • CC BY
  • CC BY-SA
  • CC BY-NC
  • CC BY-NC-SA
  • CC BY-ND
  • CC BY-NC-ND
  • CC0
  • Public Domain
  • All Rights Reserved

Licenses and Attributions for Attribution Review

Open content, original

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

Open content, shared previously

“Attribution Review” 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.

“Attribution How-To” is adapted from Attribution Style Guide by Michaela Willi Hooper for Open Oregon Educational Resources, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

References