Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

All six of the Creative Commons licenses include the BY or attribution condition. This is a requirement of reuse. The original creator has explicitly informed the user of this requirement through the use of the BY condition. Citations and attributions are similar but different. Providing attribution is the legal requirement of the open license. While some tools, like CC Search, include the attribution in the resource, there are other tools available to help users easily create attribution statements for work they reuse, remix, or modify.

Attribution Builder - created by Open Washington, this tool, similar to a citation generator, builds attribution statements that can be copied and pasted into documents and websites. Note: all the attribution statements for these modules were created using this tool.
Creative Commons License Chooser - developed by Creative Commons. Attribution statements can be created within the webpage.

When creating attribution statements a good rule of thumb is to remember the acronym TASL:

Title of the work
Author of the work
Source or where the work can be found
License of the work

See Best Practices for Attribution, for more information.

This is an example of an ideal attribution for a CC-licensed image.

“Late October on Lake Michigan” by mic stolz is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

It is an ideal attribution because it includes:

Title: “Late October on Lake Michigan”
Creator: mic stolz - with a link to their profile page
Source: “Late October on Lake Michigan“ - with a link to the original photo
License: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 - with a link to the license deed

Choosing A License For Newly Created or Adapted Work

When publishing newly created or adapted work, selecting and displaying a license with it ensures the work can be adopted and adapted how the author/creator intends. If a license is not selected, all published material may be assumed to be all rights reserved even if the intent was for it to be openly licensed.

When creating work to share, carefully consider the following:

Do you want to allow derivatives?
Do you want to allow for commercial purposes?
Do you want the same license to be applied on derivatives?
If this work was made using openly licensed material, is there a copyright provision you must abide?

Creative Commons designed the licenses to provide more options to the creator than all-rights reserved copyright. The CC License chooser is a simple tool designed to help creators decide which license is best for their work. After selecting preferred sharing permissions, a license icon, statement, and code -- similar to the one below -- is generated and can be copied and pasted into new work.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Remember, to be considered true OER, the rights assigned must permit the ability for others to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute (5 Rs). And it has to be free.

Explore Further

Creative Commons Licenses Study Cards. (n.d.). H5P. https://h5p.org/h5p/embed/533328

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