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

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’.

Ed Bremner popped over to University of Wales – Newport on the 22nd of December for a meeting with Prof  Simon Haslett and Jonathan Wallen, who has joined the team at Newport to work on the re-purposing and copyright clearance of their resources.

The meeting started with Ed giving a review of progress and the learnings made by the other partners on which it is hoped that Newport will be able to build.  Then some time was spent reviewing the proposed materials earmarked for release. On the whole, it was good too see that Newport’s content does not rely so heavily on Published Diagrams or other 3rd party copyright as does other partners materials and therefore will hopefully be a bit easier to copyright clear.

Much of Newport’s material is in the form of either videos or images and they intend to store this material on either YouTube or Flickr and use JorumOpen as a sign-post towards these resources.

This should be a very interesting approach and seems to sit very well within the intentions of the OER project.  It is bound to bring up other elements to research; for instance, how do we tag the resources in such a way that their metadata can stay with them after they are downloaded from their repository.

With Images, this could easily be done using internal file-tagging systems such as XMP, EXIF & IPTC. Further discussion around image tagging considered how we might be able to insert geo-tags on the images to extend their usefulness.  This may also be a useful way to explore the pedagogy of using geo-tags as a whole.

So a very interesting meeting and a great way to round up work on the Climate Change Project for the year.

eib

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

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

The latest copyright clearance query I have had is about ‘screen-grabs’ from browsers and software programs.

Do they need to be cleared?

Here are three examples:

Showing a Powerpoint Slide with AnalySeries Software

Showing a Powerpoint Slide with AnalySeries Software

Screen Grab from Browser showing data from ODP site

The first thing to realise is that the ‘method’ used to publish these originals does not make any difference to their ownership.  The fact that the data is published on a ‘web-site’ doesn’t give any further rights to use them.

So there being ‘screen-grabs’ is neither here nor there.

Therefore the quick answer must be ‘yes’ they do need to be cleared, however in this case there may be other reasons why you can go ahead and use them without clearance:

Graphs & Tables of Data:

First, the graphs have all come from American state-funded organisations and we know that their material has all been released into the ‘public domain’ in the US,  so we can use those anyway… If the original data had belonged to the OS or BGS, then it most probably would of been protected by ‘database rights’ in the UK, so we would have had to ask the owner for permission.

Software Screen-grabs:

Although in strict legal terms, there could be some copyright held within the program design, in reality they can be considered very low-risk.  It is normal for any product from software to be the copyright of the user of the software, not the software-maker (if you make an image in Photoshop, it is your copyright – not Adobes).  So you would not need to contact the software producer, just the user who made the screengrab which is normally much easier.

Basically:

Diagrams and Graphs do need to be cleared, even if taken from a screen-grab, although there may be some ways around this, such as re-presenting the data in another form.  Screen-grabs of software are the copyright of the user who made the screen grab not the software producer.

In our research on the clearance of  copyright on maps and map-data, we were advised to talk to Dr Mike Smith at Kingston who knows a lot more on the subject than I do!  See his bio-page at:  http://www.kingston.ac.uk/gge/staff/smith.htm

I explained how we might want to use some maps and our possible need to re-purpose some maps and map-data.

This was his answer:

*******************************************************************

Maps are a difficult area at the moment and doubly-so in the UK. The GRADE project that Edina completed reported upon many of these issues within the UK context http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitalrepositories2005/grade.aspx

its worth reading at least the executive summary. Some further thoughts for you:

-the GRADE report argues that (“paper”) maps are “drawings” and so copyright, but raw digital data (not including scans) are “data” so come under database right. Its an opinion that has not been challenged in court!

-different countries have different regulations. Ireland, Canada and the US, for example, are very open about distribution. Indeed federal data in the US is in the public domain

-not so in the UK. Please read some posts I have written on JISC licensing (distributed via EDINA) of OS data:

http://journalofmaps.com/about.php?helpfile=smartyOS.html

http://www.journalofmaps.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/GIS/os_he_license.html

-in short, you will almost certainly NOT be allowed to publish/distribute anything that in any remote way contains OS data *unless* the recipient has licensed OS data. This was the rationale behind setting up the GRADE repository (now Share-Geo) as it includes controls on access

-the BIG sticking point is the area of derived data. Anything that incorporates OS data in any form, no matter how minor, potentially is copyright to them, although their Research and Innovation department can clarify on a case by case basis. However the recommendation would be NOT to use OS data.

-all in all its not really good news. I would be wary about redrafting anything unless you can be positively sure copyright has been covered.

Feel free to get back in touch if you have any further queries.

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Well, I have to admit this is not a very rosy picture and we need to do some more thinking and I suspect a lot of talking to try and get to a point where we can use this material in our OER.

Thoughts – please – either here or on the Forum: