What are the different types of Creative Commons Licenses?
The six Creative Commons licenses allow differing levels of openness. They are organized below from the most amount of freedom to the least amount of freedom. The last two that contain ND (no derivative) are not considered open educational resources. The Creative Commons License website has a License Chooser tool that can help you create a license for your work.
CC BY 4.0
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed material.
CC BY-SA 4.0
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.
CC BY-NC 4.0
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they can also choose to add on layers of restriction (SA or ND).
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
CC BY-ND 4.0
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged, in whole or in part, with credit to you. This license is not an OER.
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 This license is the most restrictive of the six licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them, in whole or in part, with others as long as they credit you. They can’t change them in any way or use them commercially. This license is not an OER.
More about Creative Commons Licenses
You can learn much more about CC licenses on the Creative Commons website, including the Creative Commons FAQ page which is particularly helpful for detailed information about using the licenses.
We have a Creative Commons libguide with more information.