Open Licensing
Now that you know your rights as a creator, part of working in the open is deciding if you are comfortable with openly licensing your work or not. Understanding the different rights that Creative Commons licenses grant is an important part of making the decision of whether to openly share or not.
Creative Commons Licensing
Creative Commons licenses were created as a way for creators to have more control and flexibility over how their works are shared. Since their debut in 2002, Creative Commons licenses have been used on over 2.5 billion works from around the world.[1] Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, “What can I do with this work?” .[2]
Watch “Open Licensing For Student Authors” to walk you through the core pieces of the Creative Commons licenses. As you’re watching think about whether there’s a Creative Commons license that’s right for you.
“Open Licensing for Student Authors” is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license by Abbey Elder.
The Creative Commons Licenses
Let’s review the 6 different license types:
Choosing a License
The six licenses and the public domain dedication tool give creators a range of options. The best way to decide which is appropriate for you is to think about why you want to share your work, and how you hope others will use that work.[3] Your instructor should be creating an environment in which you feel comfortable either enthusiastically openly licensing your work or deciding not to. You should never feel coerced into openly licensing your work. Another thing to keep in mind is that Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable – this means that once you add a Creative Commons license to your work, that work will always retain that license. You can change your mind and add a new license to a new edition or a revised edition, but the original license will still stand.
If you decide you want to add a Creative Commons license to your work, the following flowchart can help you decide which Creative Commons license is right for you (select the image to open it up).
“Which Creative Commons License is right for me?”[4]
Here’s how the flowchart works:
I’m a creator and I’m trying to decide how I want to license my work. First, I’ll go to the “Start Here” box, and decide if I’m okay with other people copying and sharing my work without having to ask permission. I am! Now I’ll move down to the next question, which is whether I’m okay with people changing, adapting, and/or remixing my work. I’m okay with that too! Down to the next question, which is whether I want to limit how others release their remixes of my work. I don’t think I want to limit that so I’ll move to the next box which asks whether I’m okay with people making money out of reusing my work. I’m not okay with that, so I now know that the best license for me is the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial license.
You can also try out the Creative Commons License Chooser, which walks you through choosing a license and provides a link to the license so you can add it to your work.
Remember, the decision of choosing to openly license your work is yours and yours alone.
- Creative Commons. (n.d.). Creative Commons Certificate for Educators, Academic Librarians and GLAM. https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/. Licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license. ↵
- Creative Commons. (n.d.). About CC licenses. Accessed September 6, 2023. https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/ ↵
- Creative Commons. (n.d.). About CC licenses - Choosing a license. Accessed September 6, 2023. https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/ ↵
- published by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation in partnership with Creative Commons Australia. This fact sheet is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia licence, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/au. ↵