Subject and Research Guides: Open Educational Resources: Attributing, Making & Reusing content

Attributing content

All six Creative Commons (CC) licenses require attribution to the creator when using or sharing the resource. When attributing CC it is best practice to include these four elements.

Title	Author	Source	Licence
What is the name of the work?	Who allows you to use the work?	Where can people find the work?	How can you use the work?

The most open licence is CC BY 4.0 and the Creative Commons resource page explains more about this.

For specific examples of attribution for each type of content (photo's, music, public domain, text, etc), use the Best Practices for Attribution guide by CC. The interactive Licence chooser tool by CC is also very useful.

Getting started on developing resources

Authoring open textbooks This guide is for faculty authors, librarians, project managers and others who are involved in the production of open textbooks in higher education and K-12. Content includes a checklist for getting started, publishing program case studies, textbook organization and elements, writing resources and an overview of useful tools.
BC Campus self publishing guide The BCcampus Open Education Self-Publishing Guide is a reference tool for those wanting to write and self-publish an open textbook. It provides details on the preparation, planning, writing, publication, and maintenance of an open textbook. Copyright, open-copyright licences, and the differences between citation and attribution are discussed as well as the importance of copy editing and proofreading. Checklists and templates are also provided. This guide replaces the BCcampus Open Education Authoring Guide.
CAUL Australia Getting started on OER Getting starting with OER
Open Author Open Author helps you build Open Educational Resources, lesson plans, and courses and then publish them, to the benefit of educators and learners everywhere. Select one of our authoring formats to get started.
WikiBooks Open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit.

For guidance on each step of planning and workflow, follow the CAUL workflow.

Use the Creative Commons find a licence page to work out which one is right for you
Creative Commons also offer an interactive licence finder tool as another method to determine the right licence.

attribution required, modifying not allowed , commercial use not allowed, distributed on same terms

"What do the icons mean" from https://chooser-beta.creativecommons.org/ is licenced under CC BY 4.0

Open Education Licencing toolkit OEL Toolkit supports the use and development of Open Educational Resources (OER) in the Australian higher education sector.
Creative Commons licence types Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, “What can I do with this work?”
Open Licencing of Educatonal Resources Information from the joint UNEVOC and UNESCO website on how materials can be explicitly licensed as OER

Choosing and evaluating open educational resources

Check licensing: Make sure the OER you choose has an open license, such as Creative Commons, which allows for reuse, adaptation and redistribution.
Assess quality, currency and authority: Look for OER that has been peer-reviewed or vetted by reputable educational institutions, organizations, or experts. Check for reliable sources, updated content, and accurate information.
Preview and Test: Before fully integrating an OER into your curriculum, preview and test the resource yourself. Ensure it aligns with your teaching style, meets your requirements, and engages learners effectively.

Tools to evaluate OERs:

Achieve: Open Educational Resources Evaluation Tool - Handbook This is designed to step a user through the evaluation process of an online resource.
Achieve: Rubrics for evaluating Open Education Resource (OER) Objects These rubrics provide an evaluation system to apply when considering an object. Objects could be images, lessons, assessments and more.

Here are some ideas for modifying OER'S:

You might add Australian case studies into an existing OER (for instance, a textbook)
You might reuse parts of an existing OER, but in an entirely new context.
You might mix together different resources to create a new resource. For instance, text from one OER and photo's or graphs from another, as well as your own fresh content.

This text is recommended for further reading:

Schuwer, R., Baas, M. (2023). Reuse of OER, a Process Model Approach

Creative Commons use and remix One goal of Creative Commons is to increase the amount of openly licensed creativity in “the commons” — the body of work freely available for legal use, sharing, repurposing, and remixing. Through the use of CC licenses, millions of people around the world have made their photos, videos, writing, music, and other creative content available for any member of the public to use.
Search engine for reusable material; CC Find content you can share, use and remix
Open access button to install Give us a scholarly paper and we’ll search thousands of sources with millions of articles to link you to free, legal, full text articles instantly. Requesting Research If we can’t get you access, we’ll start a request for you. We request articles from authors, and guide them on making the work available to you and everyone who needs it.
OpenStax OpenStax is part of Rice University, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable corporation. Our mission is to improve educational access and learning for everyone. We do this by publishing openly licensed books, developing and improving research-based courseware, establishing partnerships with educational resource companies, and more.
University of Southern Qld, Open text collection USQ Library has curated 12 collections of open textbooks from a range of disciplines including creative arts, education, business, engineering, health, science, law and information technology.
OER collective The OER Collective is designed to incentivise development of open textbooks by academic authors at participating institutions. Multiple titles are now available on the OERC Catalogue and Pressbooks Directory with a Creative Commons licence. Their subjects currently range from biology, biochemistry, and mathematics to business, law, and language learning.
Schuwer, R., Baas, M. (2023). Reuse of OER, a Process Model Approach Schuwer, R., Baas, M. (2023). Reuse of OER, a Process Model Approach. In: Otto, D., Scharnberg, G., Kerres, M., Zawacki-Richter, O. (eds) Distributed Learning Ecosystems . Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38703-7_7

‘Issues of context and design in OER (open educational resources) Kılıçkaya, F & Kic-Drgas, J, 2021,, ‘Issues of context and design in OER (open educational resources)’, Educational Technology Research and Development, vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 401–405, doi: 10.1007/s11423-020-09852-8.
‘A Sustainable Way Forward: A Team-based Approach to Tackling Textbook Access and Affordability Issues During the “New Normal” Brailey, M & Betz, S, 2022,, ‘A Sustainable Way Forward: A Team-based Approach to Tackling Textbook Access and Affordability Issues During the “New Normal”’, Journal of New Librarianship, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 80–87, doi: 10.33011/newlibs/11/9.
‘Open Educational Practices: a learning way beyond free access knowledge’ Chiappe, A & Adame, SI, 2018,, ‘Open Educational Practices: a learning way beyond free access knowledge’, Ensaio (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), vol. 26, no. 98, pp. 213–230, doi: 10.1590/s0104-40362018002601320.

OER collective
The Open Educational Resources Collective Pilot is an initiative of the Council of Australian University Librarians.
Find open access textbooks here (which you can adapt) and a publiishing workflow guide.
It also provides further information on the goals and purposes of the collective.

initiate, plan, draft, design, review, publish, evaluate

DOAJ Australia and OASPA have a toolkit to support new and established open access journals in navigating the rapidly changing landscape (of open access publishing).
The Toolkit enables empowered and informed decision-making and is intended for anyone involved in journal publishing. It will contribute to the advancement of scholarly publishing standards and best practices.

You can read more about the tool on the DOAJ blog

Open Access Journals toolkit

Further Information

Creative Commons licence types Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, “What can I do with this work?”
Open Licencing of Educational Resoures Information from the joint UNEVOC and UNESCO website on how materials can be explicitly licensed as OER
Open Access at MQ Our guide to open access resources and ideas