Open licenses provide 5 freedoms

With regard to the licensing of content, the term “open” means:

Anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness).[1]

The specific freedoms contained in this concise definition can be summarized by the “5 Rs” of freedom:

  1. Retain – The right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage).
  2. Reuse – The right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video).
  3. Revise – The right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language).
  4. Remix – The right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup, or to repurpose it for another use).
  5. Redistribute – The right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend).

#open #strategic

See also:

  1. This is the generally-accepted definition, as expressed by the Open Knowledge Foundation (see “Open Definition” at opencontent.org/definition/). There are at least 50 uses of the term “open” in the English language (Pomerantz and Peek 2016). Tan observes the synergy that is made possible by openness across multiple domains, particularly with regard to scholarship: “Open scholarship combines open access texts, open data, and open-source software to provide openness at every stage of a research project and enables replication, confirmation, revision, falsification, and further building on it” (2018). ↩︎