The Open Government Licence (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/open-government-licence.htm) enables users to do the following with public sector information offered for use expressly under the licence:
- copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information;
- adapt the information;
- exploit the information commercially for example, by combining it with other information, or by including it in your own product or application
Users must comply with the following conditions, or else the licence becomes invalid:
- Attribution: you must acknowledge the source of the information by including any attribution statement specified by the information provider and, where possible, provide a link to the Open Government Licence. If the information provider does not provide a specific attribution statement, or if you are using Information from several providers and multiple attributions are not practical in your product or application, you may consider using the following “Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v1.0"
- No Endorsement: you must ensure that you do not use the information in a way that suggests any official status or that the information provider endorses you or your use of the information;
- Moral rights: you must ensure that you do not mislead others or misrepresent the Information or its source;
- You must ensure that your use of the information does not breach the Data Protection Act 1998 or the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.
The latest version (version 3.0) of the Creative Commons licences contain provisions for no endorsement, protection of moral rights and most importantly attribution therefore its terms are broadly similar to the Open Government Licence. Importantly, the Open Government Licence states:
“These terms have been aligned to be interoperable with any Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which covers copyright, and Open Data Commons Attribution License, which covers database rights and applicable copyrights.”
This allows the use of the OGL-licensed material as part of a CC licensed work (other than the CC0 licence, which does not provide for attribution). However, the licence should still make clear that the incorporated material is being made available under the OGL, and provide the relevant link, where possible, as noted above under attribution.
So, in summary, it is possible to include OGL-licensed information as part of an OER, but there would be risk in simply incorporating it without reference to the fact it is licensed under an OGL. However, from the user point of view, it should make very little difference as to whether the material is CC licensed or OGL licensed, as these have been intended to be ‘interoperable’ in terms of providing the same rights of reuse.