Copyright Center for CPS Online (UNH Manchester Library): Providing a License for Your Own Work

Assigning a creative license to your work is part of the copyright process. To assign copyright implies ownership- you can not license what you do not own. For GSC faculty this is a bit more complex than simply deciding to share (or not share) work you create. Rather than providing a clear answer, here are a set of questions to consider:

• Did you create this work as part of a contract with the College? For example:  you were asked to create a series of quizzes for a course. If you were asked by the College to do this, that work is owned by GSC and will be licensed by GSC.
• Did you create this work as part of your normal work as a College employee? For example: This guide has been created as part of the work done by the College Librarian. It is work owned by GSC and will be licensed by GSC.
• Did you adapt or remix work by another faculty member outside of GSC? For example, you took an open textbook from Open Textbook Library and adapted several chapters, added chapters from another open textbook, and created your own study questions. You must attribute OER you have used, mixed, or adapted, and you can add your own attribution license, which should be open.

The process for adding a creative commons license to your work is relatively easy. CC license chooser. At the chooser, simply answer a few questions, fill in the fields you need, and receive an already formatted HTML code. The HTML code may then be pasted into your course, website, or blog.

You can use creative commons licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution. Creative Commons has an excellent  Best Practices for Attribution of a Photograph page. Below are some examples taken from that page.

For More Information

If you have any doubts or questions, you can read the complete attribution requirements which are spelled out in detail in the legal code of every CC license, eg. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode#s3a. This chart compares the detailed requirements across all versions of CC licenses.

What Does the Attribution Look Like?

   This is an image from a Creative Commons celebration

Excellent Attribution

It has a:

• Title
• Author
• License

An OK Attribution

What if You Slightly Alter the Photograph?

"Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by tvol, used under CC BY / Desaturated from original. NOTE: This is considered a slight alternation of the original photograph.

In general the attribution statement should be placed below or next to the image being attributed.  See examples above