Licensing your work

In the UK, copyright is automatic at the time of creation and you do not need to apply for it. Whether or not you choose to add any copyright marks does not affect the level of protection, and your work does not need to be registered. In its default 'all rights reserved' form it means that other people are not able to copy, modify, or distribute your work without your permission. You may, however, choose to use 'some rights reserved' by applying a Creative Commons licence and specifying how others can use your work. 

Open Educational Resources should be licensed under CC BY, NC and SA licences, (and not ND licences). Some suggest that CC BY is the best licence for OER because it is the most permissive and is the easiest to comply with. The SA element makes remixing different works difficult because of licence incompatibilities, and the NC element can introduce confusion around what constitutes non-commercial use.

• Do you own the copyright to your work? If it’s created in the course of your work, check with your employer before you apply a licence (policy for Leeds employees, Sheffield staff should contact copyright@sheffield.ac.uk)

• Do you want to dedicate your work to the public domain and waive your copyright? Consider applying the CC Zero licence.

• Do you want to allow commercial use of your work? Remember it relates to the use of the work and not the user, so a commercial organisation can use work with a NC licence provided the purpose is non-commercial

• If you want to allow derivative works (i.e. permit people to adapt your work) consider whether you want to stipulate that the user should make their work available under the same terms (SA)

• Are there other rights in your work that might inadvertently prevent someone re-using it as you had originally intended?

You should not apply CC licences to:

• software, because special open software licences exist

• material in the worldwide domain (you cannot apply restrictions to public domain items).

Creative Commons provides an online tool to help you choose and apply a licence step-by-step. 

To mark your work, on printed material you should provide the full URL of the licence, e.g. https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0. On digital material you should give the name of the licence and provide a link to it, e.g. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), and on websites you can embed the licence using HTML code provided. See the additional guidance from Creative Commons on marking other formats such as video and audio.

This copyright notice can be located anywhere on your work as long as it is visible and clear to the user to which material it relates.

• Changing your mind about a licence - although a licence cannot be revoked, you can make the same material available under a different licence and / or remove the original copy. Bear in mind that anyone who finds the original work is entitled to use it under that licence until the copyright term expires.

• Disputes about how your work is used - all CC licences have a mechanism to allow authors and creators to disassociate themselves from the work or its uses. Users are not allowed to suggest that the creator endorses a particular use and, on the rare occasion a dispute arises, it can often be resolved through communication with the user.

• Charging for a CC licensed work - if you are the copyright holder then you have the right to sell your own work, and there are many examples of creators providing free access to digital resources but charging for print copies. Charging for online access is permissible but difficult to administer and anyone who pays for a copy of your work is legally entitled to share it freely under the terms of your licence.