OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. The global standard for open licenses is the suite of Creative Commons (CC) licenses; however, there are several different types of CC licenses, and deciding which licenses are appropriate for different circumstances remains a significant point of contention for the OER community. Herein, we recommend that the debate shift focus, from “Which license?” to “Which assets (and when)?” It is widely understood that only the CC BY license (and, in certain circumstances, the CC BY-SA license) provides users with all of the necessary permissions to build on a global learning commons. Thus, we recommend that OER be licensed CC BY plus in an open format, but we accept that resource publishers may only want to publish a subset of their assets as OER, thereby retaining additional rights on key assets for technical and business reasons. We believe that this approach substantially simplifies the OER landscape, gives clear opportunities to build sustainability and value-add models around OER publishing, and will ultimately increase the impact of OER in transforming educational access and practice.

Keywords

copyright · Creative Commons · intellectual property rights · licences · Open Educational Resources · sustainability