16 Licensing Your Work
Considerations
Choose carefully and consider that:
- Licenses are a legal agreement that cannot be changed.
- Licenses apply until the copyright expires.
- You must own the copyright to the work.
Carefully consider these questions when selecting a license:
- What are your reasons for sharing?
- How do you want others to use your work?
- Do you want to allow others to create adaptations?
Use the Creative Common License Chooser or the flowchart below to help decide which license is best for your project’s goals.
Applying a License
Keep the user in mind:
- Make the license clear and visible.
- Make it easy for the user to understand.
- Avoid contradictory terms.
- Use the CC License Chooser to generate code for your website.
-
Creative Commons License Chooser
Guides you through the process of choosing a license based on your own goals for your specific project and creates HTML code for your license if you’re putting the logo on your website. -
Marking Your Work with a CC License
Steps authors through the process of adding a Creative Commons license to different mediums: websites, blogs, offline documents, images, presentations, videos, audios, datasets, and more.
Attribution
This chapter “Licensing Your Work” is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and is a derivative of the September 2020 Creative Commons Certificate Course by Creative Commons, also licensed CC BY 4.0. DeeAnn Ivie adapted content from the Creative Commons Certificate Course adding it to the “Licensing Your Work” chapter in the OER Toolkit: For UTSA Faculty, Instructional Designers & Librarians.
Media Attributions
- UTSA-Libraries-licensing-CC-flowchart