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Open Educational Resources (OER): Getting Started

A finding guide for Instructors searching for course materials

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has created and released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, each with a different level of use restrictions and free of charge to the public. These licenses are easy to use and understand. Anybody can apply these licenses to their work to allow others to share, remix, or use the work without having to contact the copyright owner to ask for permission.

License Requirements


There are six basic Creative Commons Licenses based on four requirements of use. The following icons indicate the conditions that must be met to re-use a work:

Creative Commons Licenses
License Icon License Meaning
Attribution icon of a person in a circle

Attribution (BY): You may use the work as long as you give credit in the form the author requests, provide a link to the license, and indicate if you made any changes to the work.

ShareAlike icon of a counterclockwise arrow in a circle

ShareAlike (SA): You must distribute your derivative work under the same license as the original work.

Non-Commercial icon of a dollar sign with a slash through it in a circle

Non-Commercial (NC): You cannot use the work for commercial purposes.

NoDerivatives (ND): You cannot distribute modified versions of the work.

Adapted from Creative Commons website on License Conditions and Types This link opens in a new window.

  • Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative or exception to copyright, they are one way for copyright owners to distribute their work within the copyright framework. 
  • CC allows creators to specify more flexible forms of copyright that allows "others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work."
  • Look for copyright information (often at the bottom of webpages). Creative Commons licensed material sometimes display clickable icons that indicate the specifics of licensing.  

See the Creative Commons website for more info on License Conditions and Types This link opens in a new window.

Best Practices for Attribution

TASL Method for Attribution

This is an ideal attribution representing the TASL (Title, Author, Source, License) method for the image below:

    TITLE                                 AUTHOR                                     LICENSE 

"Free-the-Textbook" by Opensource.com is licensed under CC BY-SA

SOURCE is represented by the url for the image.

Public Domain materials