Pressbooks Guide for Educators: Licensing and Copyright

Owned by Juliet Wilhelm (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Dec 13, 2022
4 min read

Summary

This guide offers an overview and introduction to Pressbooks for Boise State and non-Boise State educators. Resources are provided on using Pressbooks to create OER, curricular content, and interactive learning activities.

Licensing and Copyright covers some basics on licensing and copyright in Pressbooks and offers resources to learn more.

Instructors can find OER in a variety of resources. Most OER organizations or collaborations have a database or central list of resources. The list below can be used as a starting point for faculty in any discipline. Not all of the learning materials in these repositories and sources are OER for modifying, but most of the content is freely available under Fair Use and/or with attribution.

Creative Commons Licensing

Pressbooks enables you to automatically display a Creative Commons license in your outputs. You can go to the Book Info page and select the appropriate license from the “Copyright License” dropdown menu.

This will add the CC logo and brief explanation of the license conditions to the copyright page in your PDF and ebooks, and to the landing page of your book.

Screenshot of selecting Creative Commons license in Pressbooks
Screenshot of selecting Creative Commons license in Pressbooks

Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, “What can I do with this work?” 

The Creative Commons License Options

There are six different license types, listed from most to least permissive here

  • CC BY

    • This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use.

  • CC BY-SA

    • This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms.

  • CC BY-NC

    • This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. 

  • CC BY-NC-SA

    • This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. 

  • CC BY-ND

    • This license allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. 

  • CC BY-NC-ND

    • This license allows reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.

 

Please visit the Creative Commons website to learn more about using CC licenses.

Copyright

The Copyright page is another automatic page that Pressbooks creates.

Traditional books have a copyright page, which contains various “legalese” about the book. Copyright pages can be used for all sorts of other things, including:

  • Acknowledgements (for instance of funding agencies)

  • Information about production, printing

  • Notices about cover design

  • Library of congress catalog numbers

  • ISBN

Pressbooks automatically inserts a copyright page, immediately after the title page.

At a minimum, the copyright page will include an automatically-generated message containing: Book title, copyright holder, and year of publication.

Making a Custom Copyright Page

In order to make a custom copyright page:

  1. Go to the Book Info page (see left menu).

  2. Scroll down to the Copyright section.

  3. Add whatever you like to the Copyright notice section.

Designating Chapter-Level Copyright Notices

You may find that in a textbook or edited monograph, different chapters have different copyright licenses. It is possible to add chapter-level license notices to your book, however this feature is in development and has variable results across outputs. It is best used for the web version of your book, and we are working to improve its functionality for PDF and ebook. To activate:

  1. Go to Appearance –> Theme Options and select the Display the copyright license option.

  2. Save your changes.

  3. Go to the chapter where the license will be different from the global license.

  4. Scroll down to the Chapter Metadata section below the editor.

  5. Select the chapter license.

  6. Update or save draft.

Note: Currently, this option will display the license abbreviation (e.g. cc-by-nd) in your PDF table of contents. To avoid this, while retaining the chapter licenses in the web version, we recommend using a custom copyright notice for your book as a whole, and deactivating the “Display the copyright license” option before exporting your PDF.

For a video tutorial, visit this Chapter Level Authorship and Copyright video from Pressbooks.

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