Department Resources & More!

Determining if a Resource is OER, Creative Commons Licensed, or Public Domain

1. Look for the Creative Commons button somewhere on the page,

2. Look for a link to the creativecommons.org website in the page's source code (in Firefox do CTRL-U to show the source code and CTRL-F to bring up the "find" dialog - you're looking for a link that includes the creativecommons.org domain and the phrase 'rel="license"'), or

3. Look around the website for the copyright or terms of use statement (hopefully this will include Creative Commons or the public domain), or

4. If worst comes to worst, find contact info for the author and email them to ask about how the content is licensed

5. Use the Public Domain Calculator to determine if a piece of work is in the Public Domain

Please be aware that if no copyright information is given on a resource, it is still copyrighted. You cannot cut/paste/copy material from websites and use it on our courses unless it is OER, Creative Commons licensed, Public Domain. If a resource is copyrighted, you can always link to it. Linking externally to materials does not violate copyright.