OER creation: Public licenses

9. Public licenses

Public licenses (or public copyright licenses) are a type of license that allows for a more open approach to content than is common among traditional licenses. Mainly, they authorize any user to use the work without having to sign an independent license contract with the author. Public licenses are used when the author wants to give others the right to share, use and otherwise utilize the work he/she has created. Conditions of use are specified within the selected license. Although there are several types of standardized public licenses, by far the most popular are Creative Commons licenses, which are also the most widely-used type of license for open educational resources.

Table. Summary of the basic types of the most widely used Creative Commons public licenses

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public licenses dealing with copyright, which allows for the free distribution of a work that would otherwise be protected by copyright. The spectrum of various CC types (see the Table below) gives authors various options (e.g. they can decide to allow only non-commercial use of the work) and rids those using or distributing an author’s work of the fear of violating copyrights as long as they adhere to the conditions that are stated in the license under which the author has allowed his/her work to be used. There are several types of Creative Commons licenses. The licenses differ according to various conditions that allow use. The newest is the 4.0 version. All licenses are based on several basic factors (see the table below).

Table. Description of basic elements of Creative Commons licenses.

Image	Rights	Description
	Attribution (BY)	Holders of the license can copy, distribute, depict and use a work and create derivative works and remixes based on them only if they cite the author or provider of the license in the way they have specified.
	Attribution-ShareAlike (SA)	The holders of the license can distribute derivative works only based on a license that is consistent (“not more restrictive”) with the license under which the original work is licensed. Without this measure, derivatives (i.e. created work based upon the original work) can be sublicensed with compatible but more restrictive license clauses, e.g. CC BY to CC BY-NC, i.e. editing an original work that can also be used for commercial purposes to a work that can be shared but cannot be used for commercial purposes.
	Non-commercial (NC)	Holders of the license can copy, distribute, depict and use the work and create derivative works and remixes based upon it only for non-commercial purposes.
	No derivs (ND)	Holders of the license can copy, distribute, depict and work only with the original copy of the work, not with any derivatives and remixes that have been created according to it.