Common Expressions: A Creative Commons certificate blog

Open licensing, open access and open educational resources Creative Commons licenses are key elements of the infrastructure of the open knowledge movement. This short post provides an introduction to what exactly is meant when we speak of open access and open educational resources. What is open access? Open access is a term used to describe the movement aiming to distribute research publications under less restrictive terms than traditional publishing arrangements. Research papers which are distributed under open access terms are free to read, compared with traditional journal articles which tend to reside behind paywalls and are inaccessible to the public. Open access materials are frequently distributed under licenses which explicitly permit other users to redistribute or sometimes reuse the material for their own purposes, typically while offering credit or attribution to the original author or authors. Open access materials are frequently distributed under the terms ...

 There is a world of creative work openly distributed under Creative Commons licenses to encourage their reuse – so how can we actually ensure that we reuse this material appropriately? Now that we have considered the different licenses available from Creative Commons and have discussed considerations for licensing your own work, it is worth going into some detail on the question of how to appropriately reuse Creative Commons-licensed works. This post is broken down into two sections: the first will discuss considerations for redistributing Creative Commons licensed works unaltered, while the second will discuss considerations for adapting Creative Commons works for redistribution in your own works.   Part 1: ND NoDerivatives and redistribution of unaltered materials with permission The ND NoDerivatives clause is one of the more restrictive available Creative Commons license terms, making up part of the CC BY-ND and CC BY-NC-ND licenses. This is not to say that t...

  How do Creative Commons licenses work? While our last posts gave an introduction to the context of Creative Commons more broadly, this one will dive in to the details of the Creative Commons (CC) licenses available. With a good knowledge of what the licenses are and how they work, readers will be equipped to interpret CC licenses applied to other works they may wish to reuse, and begin to consider the suitability of Creative Commons licenses for their own work.   Components of a Creative Commons license: The four license elements Creative Commons licenses are made of four elements which are combined in various ways to make up Creative Commons licenses. Each element is unique and adds different restrictions to the work being licensed: The BY Attribution element prevents the work from being redistributed or reused without attributing the creator. The NC Noncommercial element prevents the work from being reused for commercial purposes. The SA Sharealike element ...