Open licences are a set of conditions applied to an original work that grant permission to anyone to make use of the work as long as they follow the conditions of the licence.
The creator retains copyright in the work, but can choose to openly license it if they want others to be able to use it freely, build on it, customize it, or alter it. Applying an open licence makes permissions of reuse clear, transparent and explicit
There are several open licences that follow these principles; the most common are Creative Commons licences. There are other licences for specific kinds of works, such as software.
There are six Creative Commons licences available that let you know how the work can be used. You may see a combination of some of these terms in the spectrum of licences.
‘BY’ represents attribution. You will see this icon on all Creative Commons licences. This icon means that you must provide attribution by giving credit to the creator of this work in any way they have requested.
‘ND’ means no derivatives. This icon means that modified versions of the original work cannot be shared with others.
’SA’ means share alike. This icon means that the original work can be modified but the new work must be shared under the same licence.
’NC’ means non-commercial. This icon means that you can use the original work for non-commercial purposes, as-is or modified.
All six Creative Commons licences require the creator to be credited, and a link to the licence.
Creative Commons posts both a human readable summary of each licence and the legal code.
Not all material you find online is openly licensed. For example, might be free to read, download and share, but it cannot be modified in any way. An example of this might be some government documents, or material found in an institutional repository like StFX Scholar.
For support for open licences and suggestions about where you can locate open material contact library@stfx.ca