So firstly open licences help to ensure longevity of access to educational resources. It’s very common to think of open licensed resources as primarily being of benefit to those outwith the institution, however open licenses also help to ensure that we can continue to use and reuse the resources that we ourselves have created. I’m sure you’ll all have come projects that created content only for those resources to be come inaccessible once the project ends or great teaching and learning materials belonging to a colleague who has subsequently retired or moved on, and nobody quite knows if they can still be used or not. Unless teaching and learning resources carry a clear and unambiguous open licence, it is difficult to know whether and in what context they can be reused. This is a phenomenon that my colleague Melissa Highton has referred to as copyright debt. If you don’t get the licensing right first time round it will cost you to fix it further down the line. And this is one of the best strategic reasons for investing in open educational resources at the institutional level. We need to ensure that we have the right use, adapt, and reuse, the educational resources we have invested in.
From "The Benefits of Open Education and OER", by Lorna Campbell - https://lornamcampbell.org/higher-education/the-benefits-of-open-education-and-oer/
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created.
This LibGuide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Copyright is not a new concept. In fact, the framers of the US Constitution included copyright in article 1, section 8 of the Constitution when they wrote, "The Congress shall have Power To ...promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
None of those people, however, could ever have imagined what technological changes would occur in the next 250 years that would affect how people share information and challenge how copyright works. The ability to easily copy, download, digitize, mix, mash-up, edit, and all the other options available through technology have all added wrinkles to how copyright is interpreted and enforced. Many believe that copyright law is out of date and in need of revision.
Open Licenses provide a means for document/ objects to specifies what can and cannot be done with a work. It grants permissions and states restrictions. Broadly speaking, an open license is one that grants permission to access, re-use and redistribute a work with few or no restrictions (definition from Openedefinition.org).
Please see the diagram below to see the difference between all rights reserved copyrights and open license.
