OER reside in the public domain or are released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. They should be publicly accessible
The public domain means no copyright reserved, and CC Zero is the "no-copyright" version of the Creative Commons toolkit.
The Creative Commons license is the most widely used licensing framework for OER, internationally, as it is flexible, providing less restrictive options transitioning from "All rights reserved" to some rights reserved.
CC License has 4 elements:
BY: Attribution (available in every license): credit is due to the author/creator of this work (similar to copyrighted material)
NC: Non-Commercial: the work/resource cannot be used for commercial/financial profit purpose.
ND: No Derivatives: no editing or adaption of any sort for the resource. It may be used/shared as is.
SA: Share Alike: any changes on the resource should be licensed with the same license as the original work.
These 4 elements are combined in ways that there are 6 licenses:
CC-BY: the least restrictive, you must provide credit/attribution to the creator of the work and you are free to make edits and share with others.
CC-BY-SA: you must provide credit/attribution to the creator of the work, and you are free to make edits and share with others BUT under the same license CC-BY-SA.
CC-BY-NC: you must provide credit/attribution to the creator of the work, and you are free to make edits to it, but you are not allowed to use it for profit or commercial purposes.
CC-BY-NC-SA: you must provide credit/attribution to the creator of the work, and you are free to make edits to it and share with others under the same license CC-BY-NC-SA., but you are not allowed to use it for profit or commercial purposes.
CC-BY-ND: you must provide credit/attribution to the creator of the work, BUT you are NOT allowed to make edits to it.
CC-BY-ND-NC: you must provide credit/attribution to the creator of the work, BUT you are NOT allowed to make edits to it, nor are you allowed to use it for profit or commercial purposes.
CC-BY-NC-ND and CC-BY-ND, are not considered fit for OER material since the definition of OER states that we are allowed to make edits/adaptation or Remixing to the work.
