Some copyright owners are OK with other people reusing their work and want a way to easily tell people this. Creative Commons licenses are a set of legal tools that help creators (copyright owners) share their work. CC licenses work with copyright, not against it. 

Some benefits of Creative Commons licenses:

• They provide copyright owners with several options in what rights they grant to others
• They are free to use
• They also include legal language that have stood up in court
• They also include machine-readable language, meaning you can search for Creative Commons licenses in search engines like Google, YouTube and Flickr
• Creative Commons provides an easy tool to help authors select the right license for their works

What is an OER?

Open educational resources (OER) are openly-licensed, freely available educational materials (in any medium - digital or otherwise) that can be modified or adapted and redistributed by users.

• Openly-licensed: A set of authorized permissions from the rights-holder of a work for any and all users.
• Freely Available: The resources must be freely available online with no fee to access. Physical OER may be sold at a low cost to facilitate printing.
• Modifiable: The resource must be made available under an open license that allows for editing. Ideally, it should also be available in an editable format.

What is not an OER?

If a resource is not free or openly licensed, it cannot be described as an OER. For example, most materials accessed through your library’s subscriptions cannot be altered, remixed, or redistributed. These materials require special permission to use and therefore cannot be considered “open.”

Is this different from open access?

Yes. Open access refers to teaching, learning and research materials that are available free online for anyone to use as is, but they may not be revised, remixed, or redistributed. While some open access resources are made available under a copyright license that enables modification, this is not always the case. Open access terminology is typically used for scholarly works (journals, books, etc.), but can also refer to other class materials. Examples of OA materials include government documents, articles from open access journals, reports from think tanks.

What are the 5 Rs?

These five "R" attributes lay out what it means for something to be truly “open,”:

• Retain = the right to make, own, and control copies of the content.
• Reuse = the right to use the content in a wide range of ways
• Revise = the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
• Remix = the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new
• Redistribute = the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others

The origin of some of this text is from the OER Stater Kit, authored by Abbey K. Elder: Introduction to Open Educational Resources and Copyright and Open Licensing. Some revisions were made to the original text.

Creative Commons uses a mix of four rules in their licenses that are often represented by icons and abbreviations. You have very likely seen these licenses before.

By mixing these options, users can choose from six different Creative Commons licenses:

Each license is the sum of its parts. For instance, the Creative Commons Attribution license (also known as CC BY) means that users may copy, distribute and modify the work as long as they credit the author. The Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives license (also known as CC BY-NC-ND), on the other hand, means that you may copy and distribute the work as long as you credit the author and do not use the work for commercial purposes, but you are not allowed to modify the work. This license is the most restrictive of the six.

For more information about these six licenses, visit the Creative Commons site. 

You may also come across two additional tools: 

This tool is called CC0 or CC Zero, sometimes considered a seventh license. It allows creators to dedicate their work into the worldwide public domain and give up all of their rights under copyright, to the fullest extent allowable by law.

This tool is not considered a license, but a symbol applied to works that are known to be in the public domain. If you see this on a work, know that someone reliable has already done the research to determine that it is in the public domain.