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CC Attribution Guide
This comprehensive guide by Smartcopying covers the specifics of attribution placement on CC licensed works in various mediums.
Attribute OER
All Creative Commons licenses require that users of the work attribute (BY) the creator. This means you always have to acknowledge the creator of the CC work you are using, as well as provide any relevant copyright information. For many users of CC material, attribution is one of the hardest parts of the process. We've gathered resources on this page to assist users with the attribution process.
You can use CC-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution. Attributing sources is one of the most important components of OER. Here is an example of an ideal attribution of a CC-licensed image by Flickr user Lukas Schlagenhauf using the Title, Author, Source, License attributes.
This is an ideal attribution ⇒ “Furggelen afterglow” by Lukas Schlagenhauf is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0. It includes:
- Title: “Furggelen afterglow”
- Author: “Lukas Schlagenhauf“—with a link to their profile page
- Source: “Furggelen afterglow“—with a link to the original photo on Flickr
- License: “CC BY-ND 2.0”—with a link to the license deed
Open Washington Attribution Builder
Once you have the required elements (TASL), you can plug them into the Open Attribution Builder from Open Washington and generate a quick attribution result, including derivative and public domain works.
Attribution & Fair Use
This video by Abbey Elder contains information about Open Education, Creative Commons Licenses, attribution, and Fair Use.
Keeping Attributions Organized
In order to attribute properly, it's important to keep careful track as you choose your OER objects. Finding materials later can be very difficult and time consuming. Make your own table like the one below or use and modify this one.
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TITLE
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AUTHOR
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SOURCE
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LINK
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Attributing Derivative Works
Remixing the original work
If you change the original work in any way, such as cropping an image, changing the colors, or replacing words, you will be creating a derivative work of the original. You should always attribute the original work in any derivative work and identify any changes made to the original.
Often the simplest way to do this is to use the phrase “Adapted from …” or “This work is a derivative of…” and attribute the original work as you would normally. If your work incorporates a number of derivative works, you might say, “Adapted from the following sources…” and list each original work sequentially.
This is a good attribution for material modified from the original image (top image) version to a desaturated derivative.
Derived image attribution: "Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by tvol, used under CC BY / Desaturated from original