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Open Educational Resources (OERs): Attribution

This guide is designed to help Minnesota State University, Mankato faculty find, create, evaluate, and incorporate Open Educational Resources in their courses.

When is Attribution Needed?

All Creative Commons Licenses require the user to attribute the original work. This attribution is required if you post portions of an open textbook on a different platform (such as a page in D2L) or create an adaptation of an existing OER and share it with others or reproduce a portion of an OER in another work.

Attributions should include four main elements:

  • Title: List the title of the work you are using. If there is no title, leave this part out of the attribution.
  • Author: List all author names. Best practice is also to hyperlink author names to profiles or professional bios.
  • Source: Include the URL to the original work so that future users can find it. You can also hyperlink the title with the URL of the source.
  • License: List the license the original work was published under. Best practice is also to hyperlink to the license's deed page, for example, CC BY 4.0.

An attribution may look like this:

"Title of Work" (URL leading to work) by Author Name, License Used

Attribution Examples

Scenario 1

I found this openly licensed picture on Flickr and I want to use it in my presentation on the history of Memorial Library.

On the slide where the picture appears, I will include this attribution:

"Memorial Library ERC" by bendas2, CC BY 2.0

Scenario 2

I assemble a digital course packet for my students containing readings from a variety of different openly licensed sources. Included in the packet is an adaptation I made of this article. I include at the beginning of my adaptation this attribution:

Text adapted from "Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources" by David Wiley, CC by 4.0