OER’s tend to be released under a specific type of license that allows content to be used in various ways without obtaining expressed written consent from the author(s). This varies from the traditional model that most people are used to encountering, which is copyrighting.

Whenever something is created, the creator automatically reserves all rights to the work. You will see marks like these next to works where the rights have been reserved, branded, or where the author reserves copyrighting:

© ® ™

© (c in a circle) means artistic items such as written materials, videos, movies, audio, photos, etc., are protected by copyright law. The author or creator reserves the rights to the items, and the rights to reproduce/distribute these items belong solely to the author. Copyrighting protects multiple types of intellectual property. Most of the time, this symbol appears with items that have been registered in the United States with the United States Copyright Office (Truex, 2015). It is not required that intellectual property be registered with USCO to be protected by copyright law; authors and creators can protect their work with this symbol, whether the work is registered or not.

You may also see ® --which means an item has been patented and trademarked, and the trademark has been registered in the United States with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (Donahue, 2011). This symbol can only be used when the trademark has been officially registered, under penalty of fines from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (Donahue, 2011). An example might be an eCore branded item.

™ (in superscript) means that the name of an item or the brand is trademarked, but the trademark is not officially registered with U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (Donahue, 2011). This symbol puts potential infringers on notice that the logo, name of an item, name of a brand, etc., are considered intellectual property by the creators/owners, and that legal action will be taken against infringement.

OER’s, however, are much different than standard copyrighted materials that are typically used in classrooms and educational settings. For starters, they are openly licensed, which permits their free use and re-purposing by others. These resources reside in the public domain, which makes them easily found, and means they are usable by anyone.

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public licenses that enable the free distribution of what would otherwise be copyrighted work. In fact, Creative Commons is the most widely used license for OER’s.

Creative Commons is notated by a logo with two C’s inside a circle, called, “CC”.

A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and/or build upon a work that they have created. Anyone who builds upon the license is asked to share it back to the learning community. Nothing with a CC license can be later copyrighted; it must remain open and in the public domain.

How one finds and uses OER differs by the type of resources. Most of them are available somewhere on the internet, and therefore are accessed as a web link. The most common way that students access them is through a PDF document within a course. Students and faculty alike may find these linked by chapter within their courses, and this is a best practice.

Many publishers of OER textbook also offer a Print for Purchase option, but these are not free, however. These publishers print the textbooks at cost for students, so instead of paying hundreds of dollars for a new printed textbook, a student may pay $30-$60.

When you adopt an OER with a CC license, you may see symbols in the license that tell you what you can do with them. Here is a guide to help with interpretation: