What Is Section 15 in the OGL?

If your content uses Open Game Content from another OGL-licensed work — a monster statted from Bestiary rules, a feat built on a Core Rulebook combat maneuver — Section 15 requires your own publication to carry the copyright notice of every one of those upstream works, not just a link back to the license text.

This is a chain-of-title requirement: if the source you used itself credits an earlier source (the Core Rulebook credits the original System Reference Document, for example), your notice has to include that earlier credit too. See Open Game Content vs. Product Identity for what's actually eligible to be cited this way.

Carrying the upstream notices is only part of the job. The OGL's Section 6 also requires you to add your own entry to the Section 15 list for the original Open Game Content you're releasing: the title of your work, the copyright date, and the copyright holder's name — you, or your imprint.

That one line is what makes you a publisher of record rather than just a re-distributor. It's short, but it isn't optional — a Section 15 block that lists everyone else's work but not yours is incomplete. When you publish through the Forge, your Contributor Name (or Publisher imprint) becomes that line automatically. The checklist maps every piece of this to the license section that requires it.

Section 15 is the "COPYRIGHT NOTICE" block at the end of the license; Section 6 is the clause that tells you what to put in it (copy every upstream notice, add your own line). Both are in the full OGL 1.0a text on the hub. See the Section 15 notice block there for this site's own current rollup, built from every source its published content actually cites.

Doing this by hand across a long reference chain is exactly the "tedious, not hard" problem this site's free tools solve. Any published compendium record shows its own "Sources Used in This Record" card — a live, resolved chain-walk, not a hypothetical example. When you publish your own content through the Forge, staging a Contributor Name, a Publisher, and a "Derived From" source builds the upstream rollup and adds your own line for you automatically.

A generated Section 15 rollup is attribution, not permission — see Open Game Content vs. Product Identity for why citing a source never grants rights over that source's protected material.