LibGuides: Open Educational Resources (OERs): Creative Commons Licenses

What is a Creative Commons License?

A Creative Commons license is a tool that copyright holders can use to communicate to others under which conditions their work may be used.

Creative Commons licenses have three goals:

To allow creators to take control of how their work is shared and used.
To promote a culture of sharing and collaborating.
To allow the creation of communities that manage resources collectively.

Since CC licenses are a copyright tool, they apply wherever copyright may apply. The same exceptions and limitations that apply to copyright also apply to CC licenses. Creative Commons was created to ease tension between sharing work globally and copyright law. The CC licenses allow creators to do this.

A Crash Course on Creative Commons Licenses by Julianne Doner CC BY SA 4.0

3 Layer Design

CC Licenses & CC0 use a 3 layer design:

1. Legal Code - terms & conditions that are legally enforceable in court.

2. Commons Deeds - legal terms summarized into natural (human) language

3. Metadata - summarizes key information so that search engines can find using CC Rights Expression Language

Elements

Attribution (BY)
Credit must be given to the creator of the work by name or by pseudonym (unless the work is anonymous). All CC licenses include this element.

NonCommercial (NC)
The work may only be used for purposes where commercial gain is not intended.

ShareAlike (SA)
Any adaptations based on this work must be licensed under the same or a compatible license.

NoDerivates (ND)
Users may not share adaptations of their work. Users may make adaptations for personal use only.

Types of Creative Commons Licenses

Creative Commons-Attribution

(CC BY)

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

Creative Commons - Attribution - ShareAlike

(CC BY-SA)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

Creative Commons - Attribution - No Derivatives

(CC BY-ND)

This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you. This means no edits or changes to the original work.

Creative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial

(CC BY-NC)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Creative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial - ShareAlike

(CC BY-NC-SA)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Creative Common - Attribution - Non-Commercial - No Derivatives

(CC BY-NC-ND)

This license is the most restrictive of the six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Adapted from About CC Licenses, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Public Domain Tools

(CC0)

CC0 is a legal code that enables creators to dedicate their work to the worldwide public domain to the greatest extent possible. Has legal effect when applied to work.

(PD)

The Public Domain Mark is a label used to mark works known to be free of all copyright restrictions. Does NOT have legal effect when applied to work. Anyone can apply this mark to a work in the public domain.

Adapted from 3.3 License Types, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Choose a License

It is important to understand that while you control how the work can be used with Creative Commons the most basic level of the license does mean that others can use your work, you are just indicating how they can use it. Creative Commons is usually more useful for images as opposed to writing.

Creative Commons License Chooser
Follow these steps to select the appropriate license for your work.

Benefits of Open Licensing

Open licensing, such as Creative Commons, empowers creators to share their work widely while clearly communicating how it can be used, adapted, and credited. These licenses support collaboration, innovation, and equitable access by removing unnecessary legal barriers and enabling educational, research, and creative communities to build upon existing work. Advocating for open licensing helps increase the visibility and impact of scholarly and educational outputs, ensures that publicly funded work remains accessible to the public, and fosters a culture of transparency and knowledge sharing. Below are some resources to get involved and/or stay informed.

Examples of CC License Uses

1. Sharing Open Access Articles
A medical researcher publishes an article in an open access journal under a CC BY license. Other scientists can freely reuse figures and data in their own work—as long as they credit the original author—speeding up the pace of research.

2. Creating and Distributing OERs (Open Educational Resources)
An engineering professor develops a lab manual and licenses it CC BY-SA. Faculty at other universities can adapt the manual for their own courses, but they must share their revised versions under the same license, keeping the resource open.

3. Making Datasets Open for Collaboration
A climate scientist releases a dataset under CC0 (public domain dedication) so that other researchers can analyze, visualize, and combine the data with their own. This encourages global collaboration without legal barriers.

4. Posting Conference Posters and Presentations
A graduate student uploads a poster from a national conference to their institutional repository with a CC BY-NC license. Educators can reuse graphs and images in teaching, but commercial entities can’t use it for profit.

5. Publishing Images and Multimedia for Education
A biology department photographs rare plant specimens and shares the images under CC BY on Wikimedia Commons. Other educators worldwide can use the images in lessons, research, or publications with proper credit.

6. Licensing Software or Code
A data scientist develops a script for processing survey results and shares it under CC BY or a compatible open-source license. Other researchers can use and adapt the code, increasing transparency and reproducibility in research.

OpenAI (2025). ChatGPT (Aug 9 version) [Large Language Model]. https://chat.opwnai.com/chat

Resource Management Librarian

Creative Commons

Feel free to make a copy or re-use this page as long as you credit UNM HSLIC.

This guide was created by a Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center staff member and is licensed by the Health Science Library and Informatics Center of the University of New Mexico under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Open Educational Resources (OERs)