The key to making an OER is licensing it for open use, reuse, remix, redistribution, and retention. The Creative Commons licenses are the most-used indicators of what you can do with a piece of OER created by someone else (or what you want others to do with OER content you create). The licenses are:
Attribution (BY): Allow to copy, adapt, modify, share the work as long as the original creators are credited for any purposes. This is the most permissive license (beyond a CC 0, which puts the material in the public domain).
Attribution (BY) - Share Alike (SA): All rights as Attribution (BY) license and new creations have to be licensed under same terms as the original work.
Attribution (BY) - No Derives (ND): Allow to copy, share but keep the work unchanged and in whole for any purposes. No translations of a work, for example.
Attribution (BY) - Non-commercial (NC): Allow to copy, adapt, modify, share the work for non-commercial purposes only. For example, you can use it in your dissertation but cannot sell the content for profit.
Attribution (BY) - Non-commercial (NC) - Share Alike (SA): All rights as Attribution (BY)-Share Alike (SA) license but for non-commercial purposes only.
Attribution (BY) - Non-commercial (NC) - No Derives (ND): All rights as Attribution (BY) - No Derives (ND) license but for non-commercial purposes only.
You can find more information about licenses from the Creative Commons website.
If you have questions about interpreting a license for use in your class or putting a license on your own content, contact scholarworks@duke.edu, the ScholarWorks Center for Scholarly Publishing at Duke University Libraries.
