Creative Commons

Creative Commons licences offer a flexible way for Nova Scotia Health to share and reuse content while retaining copyright. These licences allow us to control how our work is used, encourage collaboration and innovation, and avoid the complexities of individual permissions for each use.
Creative Commons licences also help to ensure that we are credited appropriately when other organizations/individuals reuse or adapt our work.

No. Assigning a Creative Commons licence to your work is optional and should be done in consultation with your team and with the approval of your manager. That said, your department may have policies or procedures in place to recommend that all departmental publications are CC licensed. Please contact copyright@nshealth.ca, if you have any questions about whether a CC licence is right for you.

Content Creators at Nova Scotia Health may choose to share their content under one of two Creative Commons licences:

1. Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA)
2. Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND

Use CC BY-NC-SA:

• when there is no need to limit adaptations
• to provide other jurisdictions permission to remix, adapt and build upon Nova Scotia Health's work for their local needs
• Examples: Practice support, education and training resources, standards, guidelines

Use CC BY-NC-ND

• when adaptations to information may risk misinterpretation, confusion or inaccurate information
• Examples: Network reports, evaluations, guidelines, standards, presentations about Nova Scotia Health programs or initiatives

For publications authored with another organization, all parties would have to agree to the CC licence. Each organization may have its own guidelines/policies.

If your work includes images, or any other content for which you have a licence/permission to use, or which is free to use, you should:

• Include attribution information next to or underneath the image or content, even when not required. This lets users know that you do not own the content.
  For example: "This image is used with permission from Jane Smith. It is not licensed CC BY-NC-SA."
• Include a blanket statement (Displayed before the CC license statement), when all external content/images are from one source.
  For example: "All images are used under terms of a Getty Images licence and are not reproducible under the Creative Commons licence."

Yes. Even though the content was created at Nova Scotia Health, you must still follow the terms of the licence. If the licence specifies "no derivatives" you must get approval before adapting.
Note: It is always best practice to consult with the individual, team, or department that developed the content before adapting. Making changes to content previously distributed by another Nova Scotia Health team risks inconsistent messaging, which can cause confusion for patients and/or healthcare providers.

No. Assigning a Creative Commons licence does not mean that Nova Scotia Health gives up its copyright for the work. It simply gives us a way to tell others how they can use the work that we created and own.
Note: Ownership of intellectual property created by Nova Scotia Health employees, contractors, and contract workers belongs to the organization, not the individual.

If you plan to monetize your content in the future, a CC license may not be the right choice for you. While it is technically possible to monetize a different version of your content, it may not be practical to do so. Given that CC licences are irrevocable, the CC licensed version of your content will always be available under the terms of that licence. Even if you remove the resource from circulation, you can't control copies or derivatives that may have been made available by others. Organizations or individuals are unlikely to pay for something (even if it contains updated or additional information) if they can access basically the same content for free.

The two licences approved for use at Nova Scotia Health, CC BY-NC-SA and CC BY-NC-ND, do not permit commercial reuse. "NC" means non-commercial.

You must get approval from your manager/leadership team before assigning CC licences to your Nova Scotia Health content.

No, you cannot assign a Creative Commons license to a Canva publication containing Pro content because your rights to that content are limited by Canva's license agreement, which does not permit you to re-license it under a CC license. Canva Pro content is provided for non-exclusive use within designs, and you are restricted from redistributing it independently or claiming ownership. If you've used your own content/images and some Canva Pro content, you can assign a CC licence but you must attribute any Canva Pro content used in your presentation, clearly stating that it is not part of your Creative Commons work.