Making your work open: adding a license
As reviewed in the copyright section of this work, in the US, copyright applies automatically when a work is fixed in a tangible form (e.g. written down). You do not have to register your work in order to be protected by copyright. If you decide that you don’t want all the rights provided to you by copyright, you can assign an open license. To decide which open license is right for you, complete the Choosing your Creative Commons License activity.
Once you’ve decided which license you want, it’s easy to let others know that your work is using that license: just add it to your work! We recommend including it in the footer of documents or websites, or at the beginning or end of the resource. Indicate your license using the following template:
[picture of license] [“This work”/title] by [author] is licensed under a Creative Commons [license information, include hyperlink to license information on creative commons website] license.
It is also good to include a hyperlink on the title pointing to the resource and a hyperlink on the author to the author’s website, when available. While not required when indicating your license on your work, it makes it easier for those attributing the work to have your preferred links on hand.
For example, the license for this book is:
Publishing with VIVA by VIVA is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
This will also be the attribution statement that others will use when citing your work.
If you’re using Pressbooks, you can select a license in “Book Info” and the notification and attribution will automatically be added to your resource.
Including items with different licenses
If you included other works within your resource, we recommend adding the phrase “except where otherwise noted” to the end of your statement:
This will signal to those reading and reusing your work that they should be on the lookout for attribution statements throughout the work for reused content. When those licenses differ from the one assigned to the whole work, the license in the attribution should be followed. These alternate terms of sharing can also include copyrighted content.
Please note that once assigned, open licenses cannot be revoked. This means that someone can use, share, keep, etc your work under that license even if you create a subsequent version that has a more restrictive license. This also applies to works that you reuse, which is why it is important to keep track of the license of any resources that you reuse in your work.
Assigning licenses to previously created work
Openly licensed resources don’t have to be new content. If you’ve already created a resource, you can assign a open license and share it under that license no matter how long ago you created that content! Just follow the instructions above with the following caveat:
- Double check to make sure that any part of the work was not taken in whole or in part from a publisher or copyrighted work. This includes others works, even your colleagues that gave you permission to use that. If you include someone else’s content in your work, make sure to either include the license or get permission for use.
Licensing of previously created content is especially relevant for OER. Many instructors create slides, handouts, assignments and more for their classes. There is often informal sharing of these resources, so adding an open license only formalizes what you’re already doing. Without an open license, technically requires anyone to ask permission before using your work, since the work is automatically copyrighted. Instead, open licenses clearly indicate what downstream users can do with your work, without forcing them to ask for permission.
