Open Licenses

Open Licensing

The definition of open educational resources includes the provision of licenses that allow for sharing of content. There are several different kinds of open licenses available. The following video provides a description of some open licenses.

How to choose a license for open scientific data and code?

To freely share your creative work, including open textbooks, without requests for permission, you can dedicate your work to the public domain, or license it openly. The Archer Library has a page with information for faculty and students at https://www.uregina.ca/copyright/. For help on copyright, visit the copyright contact information page at https://www.uregina.ca/copyright/contact/index.html.

The 5 R’s of OER and CC Licensing

OERs are resources that are freely available for anyone to use, adapt, distribute, translate and share with no or very minimal restrictions. They are not only about cost savings but are developed by individuals who share the belief that the world’s knowledge is a public good and should be accessible to all. The 5 R’s of OER are:

  1. Retain: you can make and own copies of the resource
  2. Reuse: you can use the resource in your own context
  3. Revise: you can adapt, modify, translated and improve the resource
  4. Remix: you can combine and recombine the resource with other material
  5. Redistribute: you can share the resource with others

Anyone using Creative Commons licenses needs to be aware of how these licenses allow for reuse. The image below shows this for each license.