Faculty Guide on Open Education Resources (OER): OER Copyright & Fair Use

Most OER are released under Creative Commons (CC) licenses, which explicitly allow for uses beyond those typically allowed under copyright law.

In essence, CC flips the traditional copyright model, in which all rights are reserved except those expressly granted. Instead, under CC all rights are granted except those expressly reserved.

CC materials do not reside in the public domain; the creator still retains legal ownership of the work. However, unlike traditionally copyrighted materials, all CC materials may legally be redistributed to anyone, at any time, indefinitely.

In addition, most CC materials can be revised and remixed before being redistributed. The exact permissions allowed for a particular work depend upon what CC license is applied to it.

Contrary to popular belief, fair use is not a law. Rather, it is a judicial doctrine that guides courts in how to apply copyright law. As a result, fair use allowances for educational use are much narrower than commonly believed.

To quote the open access journal PLOS: "Don't assume that you can use any content you find on the Internet, or that the content is fair game just because it isn't clear who the owner is or what license applies."

This document is a code of best practices designed to help those preparing OER to interpret and apply fair use under United States copyright law.

Many materials are available free of cost online. However, being free of cost does not necessarily mean something is an OER. For something to be considered an OER it needs to be freely and legally allowed to be redistributed and shared.

An easy way to evaluate if something is an OER is to determine the copyright status of an item. Is it in the public domain, does it have a creative commons (cc) license or does it have a free software license (e.g., GNU license, MIT license)? If the material does not fall into one of these categories, it probably is not an OER.

Note: Qualification as an OER is not based on technical ability (e.g., editing a document), but rather on legal ability and permission to use, re-use and remix.

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NOTE: All links will open up in a new tab or window

To determine if you can use an item in your OER and if an item is an OER, you need to find the item's copyright declarations and/or CC licenses. These are often specified at the bottom of a webpage, though some resources specify them at the top.

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A large portion of this page is from "Open Educational Resources (OER) & Reed Library: Copyright v. Creative Commons" by Sophie Forrester at Daniel A. Reed Library, (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0).