Investigation of copyright, IPR and legal issues with Edina and OS: both utilised heavily by GEES departments r.e. cartography etc..
This meeting, held in London, was a major get-together for the HEA Subject Centres to allow them to share their experiences of the OER projects to date.
It was a very busy day with lots of input from HE Academy and JISC, but as is often the way with these meetings the most important learnings were made not in the formal content but rather over a cup of coffee in the intervals, talking with colleagues that are struggling with similar problem to your own.
The meeting was attended by Mike Sanders (C-change Manager) – re-acquainting himself with colleagues from other Subject Centres and Ed Bremner (C-change Co-ordinator) who was doing his best to keep up.
You can see all the slides for the day at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/oer/progmtgoct09.aspx
The day started with a session on IPR given by Jason Miles-Campbell from JISCLegal.
This talk and the discussion around it brought up some interesting points that had not really come up in any of our other sessions on copyright.
Moral Rights – We know that employees retain no copyright in the work they create whilst in employment, but it turns out that they don’t even have any ‘moral rights’ either. <no joy there for the author>
Copyright of Material in Repositories – Some institutes are claiming that the action of placing material on their own repositories was in some way a confirmation of their owning the copyright in those materials. <although this seems very strange and hardly defensible>.
Use of Logos in Materials – There is a possible issue over the use of Institute Logos on the OER materials. For our partners there is a general feeling that we wish to retain the ‘logo’ as a visual reminder of the attribution of the resource and that the positive ‘PR’ generated from these high quality resources is one of the reasons for doing the project in the first place. On the other hand, it appears that other OER projects take the opinion that to be truly re-usable the resources should not have any logos and should the logo be retained in a derivative work anyway? There is also a possible issue with the logo being released within a resource under a CC license. Would this not mean that the logo had also been released under a license that allows derivatives? <I think this could run and run, I don’t think the licensing issue really matters for the logos which are also presumably protected by being Trade Marks>
Multi-License Resources – One possible outcome of using the CC licenses that was suggested from this meeting was that resources should be released under the <BY-NC-AS> Creative Commons license, but with a rider saying that there were a list of exceptions and giving the details of these. <So, it is all CC except this bit…oh and that bit…etc. I don’t like this at all. If it is released as BY-NC-AS, that is what it should be>.
Re-Presentation and Re-Drawing of Diagrams – We know that facts and data are not copyright, but that the diagram that conveys this information is. For this reason, in some cases it may be possible to re-present the data in another form which avoids copyright infringement, but great care must be taken that this really is a new representation of the facts and not simply a re-drawing of the diagram, which is not allowed. <Certainly still a grey area, which in some cases may provide a possible alternative to clearance>.
Change of License in Upstream Copyright – There was some discussion on what happens if a copyrighted item is used whilst it is available under a cc license but is then subsequently returned to ‘all rights reserved’. The opinion was that whatever the license was at the time it was used would be retained although there was likely to be a burden of proof if it went to court.
There was much under-the-breath muttering to support the generally held impression that on the whole, it would in future, be much easier to simply create the OER with materials that were all copyright cleared at the time of creation.
The other talk that stood out as being particularly interesting for C-change was the introduction of the new SCORE (Support Centre for Open Resources in Education) project from the Open University. This project is building on the OpenLearn project and will extend the use of OER to help support other programmes such as the HEA/JISC OER programme. The programme aims to produce a further 3,600 hours of OER content, but of particular interest to us is that this includes 75 hours of material on climate change. We really look forwards to hearing more about this programme and seeing how it might be able to help all the HEA/JISC OER programme and in particular what synergies there are between us and them with the material on climate change.
Michael Sanders and Ed Bremner grabbed the train to Exeter for a quick meeting with Dr Richard Jones to discuss their progress on their OER materials today. This was a great opportunity to learn more about Exeter’s contribution to C-change and also to be introduced to some of the other OER authors at Exeter.
Richard showed Mike and Ed some of the possible materials that Richard and his contributing authors will use and they were very impressed with the quality.
As with the other partners, it appears that the main challenges for copyright clearance in the OER are ‘images’ and ‘diagrams’, but Richard also had a few resources that heavily relied on maps. In fact the main example of these maps were not British OS maps but rather Norwegian maps, some of which were known to be quite inaccurate and in need of updating by the team before inclusion. This is a new challenge and may possibly lead to some scratching of heads.
Anyone here speak Norwegian?
Ed Bremner and Mike Sanders managed to find a short gap in Dr Simon Haslett’s busy schedule at the University of Wales – Newport for a conference telephone call today – the 16th October 2009.
Just a catch up call really to discuss the progress on Simon’s OER materials.
Things appear a bit slow at the moment until Simon can find a Research Assistant to undertake the work….but this is in progress, so things should start to move shortly.
Ed confirms that he will be happy to come and visit as soon as someone is in place, so that he can lend a hand at getting the copyright clearance going easily and effectively.
The C-Change Co-ordinator – Ed Bremner visited Keel University today to talk to Dr Zoe Robinson and Stephen Whitfield about the C-change project and provide some help and guidance on the copyright clearance process of their teaching resources.
Ed talked with Zoe and David whilst they reviewed some of the proposed OER resources. Even a quick review quickly showed that the biggest challenge in copyright clearance terms is likely to be getting permissions for the many images, diagrams and graphs that are in the resources and normally belong to the publishers of the journal from which they came. Ed also discussed with David the possibility of using a ‘Rights Management Workflow Schema’ for recording all efforts made as part of the process. The basic schema proposed by Ed is available here but it is expected to make some changes to make it more useful.
Later they talked in wider terms about the C-Change project and the wider ramifications of the OER programme with some of the other authors at Keele including:
Richard Waller – Physical Geography
Katie Szkornik – Physical Geography
Stefan Krause – Environmental Geoscience
Stuart Clarke – Sedimentology
It was also good to meet two other members of Keele staff with an interest in C-Change and OER:
Tim Denning – Learning Development Unit - Working on the MedDev OER project
Andy Brookes – Enterprise Business Manager – Research and Enterprise Services
The day was very useful and allowed all present to discuss the challenges that face the project.
Mike Sanders and Ed Bremner huddled around a pc for this Elluminate session on IPR for the OER programme given by JISC Legal on the 13th of October as part of the programme’s ‘OER Second Tuesday‘ events.
It was a useful review of IPR in the context of the OER programme and covered some of the ground that had already been done by Naomi Korn in her copyright day for C-Change, but also introduced us to some new ideas and concepts.
The session started with Jackie Milne from JISC Legal who talked about Upstream 3rd party IPR clearance and linked to their page at: http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/Projects/OpenEducationalResources.aspx
Liam Earney from JISC Collections gave some useful material including links to:
JISC Caspar templates at – http://jisc-casper.org/content/view/templates which holds the basic version of the ‘Rights Management Schema’ that will used as a basis for development for C-Change.
Naomi Korn – IPR consultant then gave us a good explanation of what the Copyright Commons Licenses do and how the OER programme projects might want to use them. Mike and Ed were glad to see that most of the projects agreed with the C-change choice of using the Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales license.
All useful information for Ed to take to the partners.
The ‘C-change in GEES’ Project has stepped up the pace with the addition of two new members of staff who have been brought in to work on the project. Ed Bremner as Project co-ordinator is now supporting the Project Manager – Mike Sanders by looking after the day-to-day running of the project and Mark Treagust is working as the Learning Technologist.
Ed will be working with the partners to help them establish methods and workflows that they will be able to use to clear the 3rd party copyright included in their resources.
His first task will be to visit the partners and discuss the next steps.
Mark will be taking the Open Resources created by the partners and uploading them and/or their metadata to JORUM. He will also be able to help with any technical support that the partners need.
They both look forwards to getting stuck in and meeting all the partners.
Contact details are available on the Website or by email to:
Ed Bremner (C-Change Project Co-ordinator) on ed.bremner@plymouth.ac.uk
Mark Treagust (C-Change Learning Technologist) on mark.treagust@plymouth.ac.uk