Need help working with your digital documents or getting your OER textbook into Canvas? Contact Marco Carrillo (Interim OER Librarian), Lori Cassidy, (Off-Assignment) Instructional Design Librarian or Sue Harlan, Instructional Designer.
One of the strengths of OER textbooks is the ability to edit them to fit your course. Sometimes that's easier said than done. This handy guide will walk you through the requirements for editing the most popular file formats of digital textbooks, as well as providing a brief overview on accessibility.
All linkable content found on the internet - UNLESS they display a CC license; state that they are public domain; or you have requested, and been given, explicit permission to use the resources.
Required Reading:
To ensure that users are able to remix and reuse OER, Creative Commons licenses are often used to communicate the rights which creators would like to retain. Creative Commons licenses give others a variety of permissions upfront, making a faster and more transparent process. Adding CC licenses to your work can help ensure that your work is shared or reused as you see fit. For example, some creators may wish to share their work, but not to allow users to "Remix," or alter them.
Creative Commons licenses by Foter (CC-BY-SA)
For more information attributing photos - Creative Commons Ultimate Guide:
Attribution Builders help faculty to easily determine and add the appropriate Creative Commons license to Open Educational Materials. The Creative Commons license defines how the material can be used, and is required for the material to be considered OER. Use of another's work requires attribution. For more information about attribution, see Best Practices for Attribution.
The most widely usable license, and the preferred license is the Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0. Please use either the Open Attribution Builder below for documents and the HTML code from Creative Commons as it uses the relationship back to Creative Commons, a choice of the CC BY image and identifications for search.
Tool: Open Attribute Builder - Attribution Builders help faculty to easily determine and add the appropriate Creative Commons license to Open Educational Materials.
Community College Consortium for OER: Source: CCCOER > Getting Started with OER > Open Licenses
The definition of open educational resources (OER) includes the phrase “reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions,” but what does that really mean?
Every time a work is created, such as when a textbook is written or a photograph is taken, that work is automatically protected by copyright. Copyright protection prevents others from using the work in certain ways, such as copying the work or putting the work online without permission from the creator. This is called “all rights reserved.”
A creative work is in the public domain when its copyright has expired, was forfeited, or is otherwise inapplicable. This most often occurs when the author of a creative work has been dead for many years (the length can vary as specified under US copyright laws). In addition, most resources created by employees of the federal government as part of their job automatically reside in the public domain. These works have “no rights reserved” and can be used or modified by anyone with no restrictions.
Alternatively, when a creator or copyright holder assigns an open license to their work they are specifying how they want others to reuse it. Open licensing does not replace copyright. Open licenses work with copyright to promote shared use. This changes the copyright from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”
Power Point Presentation - Copyright and Creative Commons (Eileen Rhodes, MLS, Library Dir. Captial Community College).
| Learn what is Copyright and learn about the basics of copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office online reference page. |
| What is Copyright? - U.S. Copyright Office website explanation. |
| How to Obtain Permission Circular 16A (PDF REVISED: 03/2021) |
| Copyrightable Authorship: What can be registered. Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition: Chapter 300 |
Copyright on Campus [6:30]: Watch Jane the librarian help her colleagues gain a better understanding of Copyright law and its impact on college and university faculty, staff, and students.
The first stop in checking for and/or purchasing permission. Follow the "Learn" link to take courses, watch videos and more.
A fun and informative online copyright tool.
A helpful resource developed by the Association of Research Libraries.
An online tool to help determine if intended use is "fair." Also provides assistance with record keeping.