Which License Will Best Serve My Purpose?

Well, that depends on your purpose. In general, keeping your work as freely useable as possible is the best way to encourage people to actually use it.

Byte: The more restrictive the license you use, the less likely someone else will want to deal with your work.

Do you really care if someone tries to sell your work? If your work is CC-licensed in such a way that it allows commercial use, someone can try to sell it but can't change the license that you've chosen. In other words, they'd be trying to sell something that is, by explicit license, free to the public. Keep in mind, also, that "commercial use" includes, for example, an institution's bookstore making hard copies of your work available for next-to-nothing prices.

Byte: If you create a comprehensive first-year composition resource and restrict its commercial use, this valuable alternative to a digital text (which some people can't stand reading) can't be provided to the students that most need it.

Don't forget: no matter what CC license you choose, you retain full right to use your work commercially, so restricting its commercial use does not apply to you.

What other kinds of works are you using? Another important point to consider is what we briefly covered in our earlier discussion about works-within-works. Recall that, for a collection (a larger work containing at least one smaller work licensed by someone else) to be legitimately licensed, it must be distributed with no more restrictions than those works within it. Doing otherwise doesn't breach the licenses of those individual works, but it invalidates your license because you can't make licensed content less restricted.

Byte: Consider what licensing your most commonly used resources share and stick with that. For example, we wanted to license this MOOC CC BY, but since there is so much Wikipedia content in and linked to, we decided that it would be best to license the collection (the MOOC) in a way that "plays well" with Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).

If you are able to access Open Learning through your or your institution's database subscription, see Ahrash Bissell's 2009 article "Permission Granted: Open Licensing For Educational Resources," in which the author explains in details some considerations regarding the best procedures for licensing work.

A Note about Attribution

We've said a lot about attributing the work of others in a way that meets the CC guidelines and any additional requirements specified by individual authors. Before you move on to the actual publishing of the work, consider whether or not you have any preferences about how you would like your work to be attributed. If you're fine with just the title and author, as entered into the Creative Commons "Choose a License" tool, then there's no need to do anything extra. However, if you would like to require future users of your work to

link to your, your institution's, or your program's website,
include the name of your organization or department,
include a photo of yourself (a little vain, are we?),
provide any additional information about you,
NOT include your name (i.e. you are waiving the attribution requirement)

then you must articulate this clearly along with the license.

Byte: As with the more restrictive licenses, you affect the chances of your work being widely adopted or adapted when you tack on additional attribution guidelines.

Work Cited

Bissell, Ahrash N. "Permission Granted: Open Licensing For Educational Resources." Open Learning 24.1 (2009): 97-106. Academic Search Premier. Web. 18 Aug. 2013.