When publishing it's necessary to specify a licence, so that users know how your work can be used, shared and adapted. When a licence is not specified it is assumed "all rights reserved", which prevents use without explicit permission from the author. Therefore, choosing an appropriate licence is important to empower educators, learners, and institutions to be confident in using the OER that you publish.
Furthermore, once you have published work under a licence, it is non-revocable, the licence for that version of the work cannot be revoked. Only future versions can be published under a more restrictive licence, hence it is important to understand whether you may have a reason such as commercialisation to require a more restrictive licence.
Before publishing your work, it is also necessary to ensure that any 3rd party resources (typically media, such as images) have compatible licences and have been attributed if required. It may also be possible to use third party materials under copyright exceptions, but it is important these are clearly attributed and made unambiguous that these are not available under the same open licence as the rest of the resource. Make a copy of the copyright permissions log template and use it to keep track of any permissions you need to obtain from copyright holders to include their work.
Typical Licences
Most OER are suitable for a Creative Commons licence.
Creative Commons licences provide a standardised way to grant permissions to use your creative work, answering the question "What can I do with this work?".
Creative Commons licences have several à la carte attributes:
BY: Credit must be given to the creator.
SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms.
NC: Only non-commercial uses of the work are permitted.
ND: No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted. This is incompatible with the standard definition of OER!
Creative Commons provide a helpful tool to decide an appropriate licence and apply it to your work:
https://chooser-beta.creativecommons.org/
Software Licences
Software is not typically licenced under Creative Commons due to additional legal considerations with respect to liability, warranties and patents.
According to a 2015 study by GitHub; the MIT, GPL and Apache licences are the top 3 licences of projects on GitHub. Combined, they account for over 77% of all licenced projects.
MIT Licence
The MIT licence is a short and highly permissive software licence, which allows free reign to use/distribute/modify the licenced software, so long as the original licence and copyright notice are retained. MIT licences account for 44.69% of the licences in the above GitHub study.
GPL Licences
The GPL (General Public Licence) collection of licences are also highly permissive, similar to MIT. However, GPL also requires that modifications are tracked and released under the same licence. For this reason, the GPL licences are considered 'infectious' and can discourage users that may wish to use the licenced software in a commercial project.
Two official variants of GPL are also commonly used:
LGPL (Lesser GPL): Typically applied to software libraries/packages, only modified versions of the software are required to be distributed under the same licence. Software that only 'uses' the library or package is not impacted by this clause.
AGPL (Affero GPL): Typically applied to web sites/services, in addition to the regular requirements of GPL it specifies that the source code must be distributed along with the web publication.
GPL licences account for 21.84% of the licences in the above GitHub study, with LGPL and AGPL accounting for a further 1.30% and 1.05% respectively.
Apache Licence
The Apache licence is another highly permissive licence, which allows free reign to use/distribute/modify the licenced software, so long as the original licence and copyright notice are retained and changes are stated. Going further than MIT, it addresses the use of patent claims and denies the use of trademarks and logos. Apache licences account for 11.19% of the licences in the above GitHub study.
There are many more available software licences, choose a licence provides a helpful tool to decide an appropriate licence and apply it to your software:
Mixed Licences
OER which combine multiple forms of media can have multiple licences, it must be explicitly stated which licence applies to which components.
Further Resources
The University Library: The university library details a wider range of licences, including more restrictive ones.
The University Copyright Hub: Openly licensing your research software.
White Rose Libraries OER Toolkit: White Rose Libraries provides greater coverage of OER specific licencing concerns.
tldrlegal.com: Licences explained in plain English.
Copyright permissions log: a template for you to copy to help keep track of 3rd party content permissions