What CC BY-SA Means

The Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike License is one of the licenses created by the Creative Commons project. A work licensed in this way grants all the four freedoms listed in the definition of free cultural works:

1. The freedom to use and perform the work: The licensee must be allowed to make any use, private or public, of the work. For kinds of works where it is relevant, this freedom should include all derived uses (“related rights”) such as performing or interpreting the work. There must be no exception regarding, for example, political or religious considerations.
2. The freedom to study the work and apply the information: The licensee must be allowed to examine the work and to use the knowledge gained from the work in any way. The license may not, for example, restrict “reverse engineering.”
3. The freedom to redistribute copies: Copies may be sold, swapped or given away for free, as part of a larger work, a collection, or independently. There must be no limit on the amount of information that can be copied. There must also not be any limit on who can copy the information or on where the information can be copied.
4. The freedom to distribute derivative works: In order to give everyone the ability to improve upon a work, the license must not limit the freedom to distribute a modified version (or, for physical works, a work somehow derived from the original), regardless of the intent and purpose of such modifications. However, some restrictions may be applied to protect these essential freedoms or the attribution of authors.

The license places three key restrictions on those freedoms:

1. You must not restrict access to the work using technical measures, or otherwise attempt to impose limitations on the freedoms above.
2. You must give proper attribution to the author and retain the license notice.
3. You must release derivative works under an identical or similar license.

In other words, if you use material that has a Share-Alike license, you must publish whatever you do with it, and publish it under an SA license as well.

How to Use CC BY-SA Sources in Lumen Courses

OER material with a CC BY-SA license allows you to apply any of the 5R’s (reuse, revise, remix, redistribute, and retain) to it.  You can copy & paste it straight into Lumen texts; you can adapt it; or you can remix it with other CC sources (except CC ND).

If you revise or remix SA content, you must publish your adaptations with an SA license, as well.

How to Attribute CC BY-SA Sources in Lumen Courses

1. In the “Citations” portion of your Edit Page, beneath the text editor box, select “CC Licensed Content.”
2. Add as much information about the Description of the Content, the Author, the Organization, the URL, and the Project as you have available.
3. Under the “Licensing” pull-down menu, select “CC BY-SA: Attribution-Share Alike.”
4. Click Update on the right to Save the page (or “Publish” if the page hasn’t yet been published).

How to Apply it to Your Original Work in Lumen Courses

If you create material in your Lumen book that you’d like to license as CC BY-SA, you can use the same tools to cite it as noted above.  Use the “Description” and “Author” fields in the Citation section to give yourself credit for this work.  Including your “Organization” (such as school name) and/or the URL for your institution will be helpful if others want to contact you about this work later on.

If you opt to apply SA to your own work, you are requiring that anyone who uses it, who wishes to share it, must also publish what they do with it under a CC BY-SA license.