How do we wrap our OER resources?
We are getting to a point where most of our partners have got a large amount of their OER resources ready and we have to make a decision on just how we ‘wrap’ our OER before uploading.
We have already decided not to use a common ‘design’ or ‘look’ to the resources across all the materials as our partners want to retain their institutes logos and corporate design on their own material. There is also a very wide range of material, that will be delivered in wide range of ways including: JorumOPEN, Institute Repositories, YouTube & Flickr.
But all the same it would be good if we could agree across the partners on some basic metadata and wordings that could be used within all of the c-change OER materials.
Currently we are thinking that this should include:
Front Page:
- Title of Work
- Author and Institute
- Date of creation or last updated
Credits, Terms & Conditions:
- Details of CC license with link to Creative Commons Website
- Details of any other 3rd party licenses are within the work
- Acknowledgements to the programme, project and funders
Should it include a ‘Take Down Policy’? We are discussing this, but are tending towards the view that only the repository can provide that and not the item itself.
Then there is the question of how this information is best kept with the item. Certainly it can be put into a page and held within the resource, but I would really like to consider also putting this data into the file-tags so that it is also held within the file itself.
Any thoughts?
Hi All,
please see that I have now released a draft version of a ‘Best Practice for the Back Page in OER’ article, which is on the blogsite at:
http://c-changeproject.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/back-page-notes-draft-1e.doc
There is also a new post giving some of the background to it.
cheers
eib
@Mike Sanders
Yes, that’s how I understand it. If the overall resource is covered by a licence that allows derivatives then the logo can be stripped out anyway, as long as attribution is still given. Problem solved.
Chris.
@Chris Taylor
worms indeed!
institution x wishing to reuse resources from institution y but not wanting the logos visible could be a particularly wormy one. I guess if derivatives are permitted in the CC licence then removal of the logos is permitted under this as long as the attribution is correct?
Hi Ed (and Mike),
You’re right of course, the original copyright/trademark belonging to the University cannot be stripped off and replaced by a valid CC licence, I’m just not sure that the institution would take kindly to someone attempting to release it under another licence without exempting it. It’s the one thing institutions seem very keen to protect. That said, I don’t want to open a big can of worms for you, and I’m no expert so feel free not to approve this reply if you don’t think it’s suitable.
For Mike’s point, I agree, the incentive of marketing is a big pull for putting out resources, so it’s understandable people are keen to maintain their branding. I think there has to be a balance here though, as on the flip side, you don’t want to discourage people from using them in other institutions by having overt branding splashed all over them. This was something brought up at the OER internal meeting on 20 Oct in London, and I think it was a fairly even split.
Chris.
Thanks Chris,
I can certainly see your point and am currently talking to our partners to remind them of the need to draw up some form of text/notice go in their resources to identify them as being under a different license.
Earlier on we discussed this with another OER project that thought that it wouldn’t be too much of a problem as the institute logos were also protected by trademark laws… Any take on that?
eib
@Chris Taylor
Thanks Chris – on your first point:
For some contributors I guess part of the attraction of releasing OERs will be the opportunity to profile their HE institution so we anticipate that logos will stay on many of the GEES materials. As you say the down side to this is a more involved licensing arrangement for the end user. We mulled this over earlier in the project and decided we would leave it to the contributor to decide. I like the idea of the text workaround though.
Mike
Hi Ed (again!),
Are your project partners aware that their institutional logos will be subject to the Creative Commons licence applied to the resource, unless they are explicitly identified and tagged as remaining under university copyright?
Once we mentioned this to ours they were all quite keen to simply have textual references to the original institution.
—
Regarding keeping the information with the item, the most comprehensive way would be to content package them using eXe, which is preferred by Jorum, but obviously this adds an extra layer of work for each resource. Once content packaged though, it makes uploading to JorumOpen much quicker, as the repository automatically harvests the metadata from the content package, so you don’t need to re-enter it.
Chris.