OER for your Dissertation
What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons licenses provide users with a greater flexibility under Copyright law and enable creative content to be shared more easily.
"Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law." - Creative Commons
Why use Creative Commons?
Recognising license attributions
Creative Commons licenses can be tailored to suit the needs of the user, and come in the following six formats:
CC BY the least restrictive type of CC license. Lets others share, edit, and build upon your work, commercially or non commercially, as long as they credit the author of the original work.
CC BY-SA allows the user to do all of the above, as long as they share their edited material under the same license agreement.
CC BY-ND does not allow the user to edit the work, but allows sharing of the work commercially and non-commercially, provided the credit the author of the original work.
CC BY-NC lets others share, edit, and build upon your work non-commercially, provided they credit the author of the original work.
CC BY-NC-SA allows the user to do all of the above, as long as they share their edited material under the same license agreement.
CC BY-NC-ND the most restrictive type of license. Allows others to share your work as long as they credit the author, but does not allow for editing of the work or commercial use.
For more detail, see the Creative Commons website: about the licenses
How do I choose the right license for my material?
The Creative Commons website provides a quick and easy License Chooser quiz, where users can answer multiple choice questions on what they need from their license.
How do I attribute material offered under a Creative Commons license?
"CC licenses have a flexible attribution requirement, so there is not necessarily one correct way to provide attribution. The proper method for giving credit will depend on the medium and means you are using, and may be implemented in any reasonable manner. Additionally, you may satisfy the attribution requirement by providing a link to a place where the attribution information may be found." - Creative Commons
How do I attribute correctly?
Dependent on the license used, and the information you have about the author, you will need to create your attribution information. Some good and bad examples, along with instructions are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
What are moral rights?
Moral rights are rights of creators of copyrighted works generally recognized in civil law jurisdictions and, to a lesser extent, in some common law jurisdictions. They include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work.
"Usually authors wish to formally assert a "moral" right to be properly acknowledged as the author. The University believes this is good practice as it gives proper recognition for work undertaken. The right must be positively asserted. To ensure proper attribution, a good form of wording would be: "The right of [name of author] to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988" - Open Educational Resources at the University of Edinburgh
For more information on Moral Rights see the links below:
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0/Moral_rights
https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/w/page/25308415/Legal%20Aspects%20of%20OER