Open Educational Resources (OER)

To ensure that your work is considered "open" in a way that qualifies your creative work as an "open educational resource," you should choose and add a Creative Commons license. By default, in the United States, the moment that a creative work is expressed in a fixed format, it is protected by copyright. A rights holder can add a Creative Commons license to allow more flexible uses of their material based on the license that they add to their work. 

For example, a creator may want to:

• allow completely open use of their materials, requiring only attribution to note the creators' identity, a creator could choose the CC-BY license (Attribution only)
• allow open use of materials and require the adaptation of those materials to carry the same license, choose CC-BY SA (Attribution and Share Alike)
• allow open use of materials for noncommercial purposes only, while requiring attribution CC-BY NC (Attribution and NonCommercial use)
• allow open use of materials for noncommercial purposes only, while requiring attribution,  and require the adaptation of those materials to carry the same license, CC-BY NC SA (Attribution, NonCommercial and Share Alike)
• allow open use of materials but prevent any adaptation of the material, CC-BY ND (Attribution and No Derivatives)
• allow open use of materials for noncommercial purposes with no adaptations of the materials allowed, CC-BY NC ND (Attribution, NonCommercial, No Derivatives)

To choose your license using a tool from the Creative Commons organization, go to: https://creativecommons.org/choose/