Choosing the right license for your Free and Open Resources for Education

Prepared byProf Derek W. Keats

The University of the Western Cape

Cape TownSouth Africa

dkeats@uwc.ac.za

The underpinning nature of the license

Licensephilosophy

resources

met

hodo

logy

Just like Free and OpenSource Software, Freeand Open Resourcesfor Education consistsof a philosophy, a methodology for creating them, and of course the resources themselves.

Underpinning it all isthe license that determines and is determined by the other three components.

Recommending a license

• The recommendations made here are not universally accepted

• They are based on years of study, and nearly a decade of using free and open licenses for educational resources

• These recommendations are based on the assumptions as expressed in the tutorial entitled "Prof Derek and the NonCommercial restriction

Where no immediate commercial revenue is expected

• The default license should be the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (by-sa) license

• This is the license that most respects freedom, by allowing – copying for any purpose and – production of derivative works as long as those

derivative works are made available to the community under identical terms

• This copyleft restriction that ensures any derivative works, even if done for commercial purposes, come back to the author and the community.

Where content is expected to be published commercially

• The appropriate license is Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike NonCommercial (by-sa-nc)

• This license allows content to be copied and extended for non-commercial purposes only.

• It may seem counter-intuitive, but content published in this manner often earns greater revenue from sales than content published under full copyright.

Further recommendations where content is expected to be published commercially

• You can ask the publisher to include a reversion clause after a period of time after which commercial revenue is unlikely to be gained

• After this time, which you and the publisher determine, the license will revert to Attribution-ShareAlike

• At UWC, the recommended time period is 5 years, but the authors are free to alter this to a shorter or longer period depending on circumstances.

5 years

Where derivative works are not appropriate, such as when the item is an opinion piece

• The appropriate license under is Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives (by-nd)

• This is appropriate, for example, when writing an opinion blog, or a magazine article that contains strong elements of opinion

• It is rarely necessary to include a NoDerivatives restriction for educational content

Considerations under other circumstances

• There may be rare circumstances where these licenses are not possible, for example, when publishing in a collection where the publisher does not allow these licenses

• However, in most cases, even die-hard publishers will allow individual articles or chapters to publish under such licenses when asked to do so– I have published several articles in commercial

magazines under Attribution-ShareAlike license• Educational resource authors are therefore

encouraged to request that their article to be granted a Atribution-ShareAlike license whenever possible

Credits

• The baldy man image used from the Creative Commons website under Attribution 2.5 license because he looks like me!– http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/

Derivatives of thiswork are welcome

BY-SA/GNU FDL