For some of our OER Partners, there is a slight worry about ‘how’ their materials may be used (or mis-used) in the future.

They are happy for their material to be released, even under a ‘share-alike’ CC license….but still they worry that it might be re-used in a way that they feel could mis-represent their original intentions.  This is particularly the case with some materials that are built on research into  sensitive issues of ‘climate change’.

Some authors have suggested they might be more comfortable if we were to tighten up the CC license for these materials and released them under a ‘No Derivatives’ CC license, but we have tried to discourage this as we felt it was an approach that lay outside our ‘open’ intentions.

But recently another idea was suggested:

Could these materials be protected at all under the author’s ‘Moral Rights’ which allows the author:

“to object to derogatory treatment of the work or film which amounts to a distortion or mutilation or is otherwise prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author or director”

This seems an interesting idea and certainly I think we should add a line to our ‘Back Page’ notes that specifically says that the author retains the ‘Moral Rights’ on the work……however, there are some examples of where these rights do not apply and these include:

“where ownership of a work originally vested in an author’s employer”

So we again return to the thorny question of who the primary copyright holder is.  If we work on the principle that as the academic author was employed to write this material, he does not hold any copyright in the work, then he isn’t going to hold any ‘Moral Rights’ either.  However if an institute’s IPR policy allows for the original academic author to retain (in part or whole) the copyright in their own works, then arguably they should also have the ‘Moral Rights’.

For further details on ‘Moral Rights’ in the UK see:  http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-otherprotect/c-moralrights.htm

Any other thoughts on this?

This is a question that I had very early on,  that somehow got brushed a bit under the carpet.

All our partners have undertaken a fair amount of copyright clearance work and now have a list of permissions, licenses, letters, emails etc covering hopefully all the material within their resources.

Although we did endeavour to try and standardise this metadata across the partners, in reality each partner had a different set of resources, that gave rise to a different approach and now have a different set of materials that make up their due-diligence files.

So, is there any chance of finding or establishing a ‘standard’ way of storing them?

Stephen Whitfield at Keele has suggested we keep the files (or electronic version of them) within their repository with the materials.  I like this idea…..but is this really the best place for it?  It isn’t really a teaching resource is it?

Any thoughts?

Thrilled to see this wonderful ‘Copyright Clearance Helper’ from our friends at HumBox:

http://labyrinth.sgul.ac.uk/openlabyrinth/mnode.asp?id=qwnw2gcf4jesnqajxhq1rx7jzqajxhq

This has been put together by Oren Stone and Erika Corradini at Southampton using the Open Labyrinth software.

It is still in draft form at the moment, so we might see some changes before the final version, but it seems to me like a wonderful resource already.

eib

The GEES Subject Centre is delighted to announce that:
‘C-Change in GEES – Open Education Resources (OERs) for climate change and sustainability – practicalities & pedagogy’ is to be held on Thursday the 29th of April 2010 at the Macdonald Hotel Manchester from 9.30am to 4pm.

This event will mark the launch of the C-Change in GEES project and has two main aims:

1. To disseminate the resources and learning outcomes from the GEES Subject Centre project ‘C-change in GEES: Open licensing of climate change and sustainability resources in the Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences.
2. To promote the ‘Pedagogy of Climate Change’ book, published by the GEES Subject Centre and edited by Simon Haslett, Derek France and Sharon Gedye. Due to be launched at the event.

This event provides an excellent opportunity to both learn more about the production and use of OER materials for the GEES and also to further explore the pedagogy’s of climate change, identify the areas for development in our knowledge and understanding and look forward to what can be achieved in the future.

For further details of the event please visit:
http://gees.ac.uk/events/2010/geesoer/geesoer.htm

for any more information please do get back to anyone in the C-change team.

I have to admit it was with slight relief that I saw that some other OER projects are also having problems with clearing 3rd party works with publishers.

See BERLiN posting:   http://webapps.nottingham.ac.uk/elgg/berlin/weblog/2510.html

For some of our partners, this approach is our only option for a large proportion of the content and as it suggests in the last sentence, we suspect that this problem will be best approached at a higher level in order to get a ‘shift in publisher mindset’.

The latest version of the C-change Rights Managment Workflow is now available on the Documents pages of this website.

It is available in two forms, both as an interactive mindmap in PDF and as a simple image of the mindmap.

c-change_rights_management_workflow_player 3b

c-change_rights_management_workflow_3b

To fully view the interactive version of the mindmap, you will need to click on the (+) on each arm to open it up. To view the text within the arm, simply hover your mouse over the text icon on the arm you wish to read.  Do be aware that there is another part of the mindmap working its way up from the bottom, which you also need to open to have the full map.

It is still in a pretty draft form, but getting better – any thoughts would be appreciated.

eib

Mark Treagust and Ed Bremner went down to Southampton for this one-day event on IPR for the OER, organised by the HumBox Project http://humbox.eprints.org/

It was a good oportunity to hear about how things are going at Southampton and the LLAS Subject Centre, with details from Alison Dickens about the HumBox project and from Erika Corradini about the ongoing practical issues of IPR in their OER project.  This was followed by a lively key-note address from Hugh Davis (despite having a broken leg and dislocated shoulder) giving us a better understanding of Southampton’s EdShare project.

In the afternoon Diana Galpin from the Research and Innovation Services at Southampton gave us an overview of the IPR law that effects us in the OER projects and wisely warned against taking a too ‘easy-going’ approach to our clearance, especially of any high-risk items belonging to commercial organisations.  They are out there….and watching the OER closely. If a project steps too far out of line, there is always the chance that somebody will become the basis of a test-case.

Before the day finished with a panel session there was time to hear from IT third year student Will Fyson, who for his major project  is in the process of developing a tool that takes a Powerpoint file and strips out the images and allows you to either copyright clear them or find alternatives (with a search in Flickr Commons).  When you are finished the cleared or new images are put back into the Powerpoint file.  Very clever and slick.  I look forwards to hearing more about this project.  I would like to see it be able to read and write the XMP/IPTC image-file tagging/metadata  so you could see other copyright owners and mark images as CC (if they are!).

Their were a couple of off-key chords in the day…

I was a bit worried in the panel discussion, when:

We were discussing how much easier it would be if the copyright clearance was done at the time of creating the resources, but pity this was outside remit of current OER Programme.

When someone from the OU, said that wouldn’t really work as in their experience it  took 6 months to get the clearance (I think OPENLearn can do it in less) anyway.  I am not sure I would disagree with this…..but on the other hand, we just don’t have 6 months.

Also when discussing the problems with asking publishers for open release of their diagrams and other copyrighted material, someone from JISC Legal suggested we (the OER program) were just 3 years too early …..again I think that may well be right, but we just don’t have 3 years to wait.

On the whole I am still surprised that others don’t seem to find this as worrying as I do!

eib

Partners, especially Southampton and Keele are right in the middle of the copyright clearance process at the moment and to be honest, the news is ‘mixed’ at best.

On one hand we have been told by SCORE and others that Elsevier is freeing up its approach to allowing its material to be used in OER…..but then we find that our attempts to ask for clearance are being channelled through their web-based ‘Rights-Link’ software, which asks us for a payment of £106.00 for the 8 figures required.

The big challenge here is getting through to the right person.  It may well be that ‘Elsevier’ and other publishers would be happy to release some of their copyrighted material on CC license, but we don’t seem to be able to get past the ‘Rights-Link’ software to find anybody to actually ask.  Attempts to get in touch are simply diverted to ‘Rights-Link’, which is obviously not able to provide the clearance, so diverting us back to contacting by email which is then often simply ignored or receives the following:

Elsevier will only reply to reuse request emails if the work you wish to use content from is not available online. No response will be made to messages involving publications available online.

Again, we hear that the  British Geological Society is working towards freeing up their material:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8398451.stm

They have made their data and resources open access – free to use for non-commercial educational purposes. The description is here:

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/about/copyright/non_commercial_use.html

But again we will have to see how this works out in practice. Really, unless the permission allows use, automatically, without contact, we are unlikely to of really moved forwards far.

Meanwhile, although we have had some successes in clearance, it would seem that we have also had a larger number of failures than we had hoped, including:  Palgrave MacMillan and Blackwells.

Sooner or later, we are really going to have to think about how best to take this forwards and whether we may have to accept that putting in links to the resources may be the only viable way forwards.

eib

Getting copyright clearance from publishers for OER materials is not just a UK issue, so I contacted colleagues at the Science Education Resource Center (http://serc.carleton.edu) for some advice from a USA perspective. SERC hosts a wealth of online teaching resources particularly for the Geosciences. Here’s what their technical director, Sean Fox, had to say (NB these notes are taken, with permisson, verbatim from a personal email):

“We run into this all the time and there is no easy answer.  Although the copyright clearance center and the like make it easier than  it used to be buy limited right to stuff from publishers, that doesn’t solve the problem when you want to create things that are freely redistributable.

Here’s the strategies I know that people are using:

1. Make partnerships directly with the publishers that allow you to use the content in the way you want.  This is obviously very time-consuming since there are lots of people to negotiate with.

Here’s an example of that where NSDL has negotiated with a big group of publishers for a specific use of select materials: http://nsdl.org/pd/?pager=classic_articles

Doing this on your own is likely impractical but there may be existing arrangements you can take advantage of.  We have an arrangement like this with nagt.org such that we can publish any of their articles online in association with teaching activities.  Of course at this point they are moving to open-access anyway so that’s less of an issue.

The obvious lever point in working with publishers here is that if they don’t provide open access (to some of their stuff) you can choose to ignore their material entirely (and it becomes less important).

2. Don’t provide the original materials; just provide the reference to the original materials.  We do this when we have activities referring to articles. Just provide the reference and let the faculty member get access (under the assumption that their institution may already be paying for access).   Thing can be used in conjunction with:

3. Find/Make a substitute.  Rare is the material that is really unique in the universe.  Often you can find a substitute that’s okay (if not ideal).  Alternatively since ideas and data aren’t copyright-able –just particular expressions– you’re usually free to make own version of that important figure/graph/diagram from scratch.   This takes work, but solves the problem.  Here’s an example where the original figure (a gel) was important, we couldn’t get permission from the journal, so we made a surrogate (simplified) figure so faculty could see what we were getting at.  They can decide to track down the journal and get the original if they really cared:

http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/coached_problems/examples/example1.html

There are some OER-involved campus that have a whole pipeline of staff and student workers who are engaged in a “identify rights compromised items/find substitute” process for all faculty material put online. It’s a big piece of work.   There was a group who gave a talk about this at the OCWC 2009 meeting, but unfortunately I can’t track down the title.  It seems the program online isn’t up to date.  I think it was a presentation late in day (on the last day?) [HK: Info about the conference can be found at http://www.ocwconsortium.org/conferences/index.php/ocwcglobal/monterrey2009]

No easy answers.  Let me know if you come up with anything else clever.

Sean

sfox@carleton.edu | Technical Director | SERC | Carleton College”

It was great to see today that both my messages left on the SCORE (Support Centre for Open Resources in Education) Forum have been answered by Rose Webb of the SCORE team.

I had a question about copyright clearance and about any case studies from the OpenLearn Project.

You can see the threads at:  http://labspace.open.ac.uk/mod/forum/view.php?id=386669

In the copyright clearance query, Rose suggests that we could ‘batch-up clearances and ask for a discount’ which worries me a bit as we don’t really have any budget to spend anyway.

She does suggest that Elsevier are starting to engage with the concept of OER and gave this link:

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_00891

Do please read the threads on SCORE Forum and comment if you wish.

eib