Open Access Week Challenge 2023

Welcome to Day 5 of the Open Access Week Challenge!

Today's activity will focus on how to discover and distinguish between the varieties of Creative Commons licenses..

In this part of the Open Access Week Challenge, you should expect to learn the following:

• How the Indiana University Intellectual Property Policy affects your ability to create affordable learning materials 
• The definition of open educational resources (OER) 
• The role of the Creative Commons organization in enabling the creation of open educational  
• Licensing options for OERs that dictate what others can and cannot do with your product 

Indiana University's Intellectual Property Policy

The Indiana University Intellectual Property Policy provides that "Copyrightable works are subdivided into Traditional Works of Scholarship, ownership of which remains with the creator of the work, and University Works, as to which the University retains ownership."  

Traditional works of scholarship include textbooks and other teaching materials that you create.  You have control over the copyright of these materials.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

The intellectual property policy allows you the opportunity to apply copyright licensing to your creative works that apply to teaching and learning.  This opens the door to the creation of open educational resources (OER), which are defined by UNESCO as "learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others."

Open educational resources are commonly provided to students free of charge and, depending on how they are licensed, may be used in various ways by other educators in other settings.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization formed in 2001 for the express purpose of providing a free set of tools to enable creators to share aspects of their copyrighted works with the public.  Creative Commons has developed a set of six copyright licenses that can be applied to creative works.  These licenses provide creators the opportunity to preserve certain aspects of their copyright while allowing others to use or incorporate their work in varying ways and to varying degrees.

Creative Commons Licenses

There are currently six available Creative Commons licenses to choose from.  They are:

• Attribution (CC BY)  This license lets you distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the original work, even commercially, as long as you credit the original creation.  This is the most accommodating of licenses offered.
• Attribution-ShareAlike  (CC BY-SA)  This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon the original work even for commercial purposes as long as you credit the original work and license your new creations under the identical terms.  This license is often compared to 'copyleft' free and open source software licenses.  All new works based on the work should carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.  This is the license used by Wikipedia.
• Attribution-NoDerivs  (CC BY-ND)  This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to the original work.
• Attribution-Noncommercial  (CC BY-NC)  This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon the original work non-commercially.  Your new works must be non-commercial and acknowledge the original work, but you don't have to license your derivative works on the same terms.
• Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)  This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon the original work non-commercially, as long as you credit the original work and license your new creations under the identical terms.
• Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND)  This license is the most restrictive of the six main licenses, only allowing you to download the original work and share it with others as long as you credit the original work.  You can't change the original work in any way or use it commercially.

For this challenge, consider any creative work you have produced in the furtherance of teaching and learning.  Textbooks, lab manuals, and videos are a few examples of items you may have produced that could be licensed under one of the Creative Commons licenses.  If you make your work publicly visible without a Creative Commons license you are declaring that you reserve all aspects of copyright ("all rights reserved").  With a Creative Commons license you are making it possible for others to use and possibly build on your creative work.

Consider an item that you either have created already or could possibly create that would be eligible for a Creative Commons license.  Consider how you would like to make that available to faculty colleagues around the globe and select the Creative Commons license that provides the best fit for how you would like to see your work used in the future.

If you would like to discuss copyright licensing or OER development after this challenge, send an email to Bill Orme, University Library OER Liaison, at orme@iu.edu.