Just saw this on the BERLiN Blogsite and was very impressed:

http://webapps.nottingham.ac.uk/elgg/cczss1/files/-1/825/OER+Terms+of+Use.doc

We will need to develop something very similar shortly and I think this would make a very good starting place.

eib

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.

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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!

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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

A while ago I was talking with Tim Denning at Keele University about the lack of clarity in the approach many Universities have to IPR in the widest context.  Tim is working on MedDev, another project in the OER Programme and they intend to grab this bull by the horns and undertake a survey of their partners to try and find out a bit more about university institutional IPR policy.

It would be great to extend this survey as wide as possible so I would encourage all of you to get in touch with Tim or Adrian on oer@keele.ac.uk and I am sure they will be delighted to send you the details of how to fill out the survey.

These surveys always take a little time to fill out, but it should be worth the effort as they promise to share the results with all those who have filled it out and I think it will make very interesting reading.

This was a very useful session that gave a good overview of  IPR and copyright and I recommend it to anyone who wants to catch up on the basics of the law.

Even better, it is still available from JISC Legal here.

For myself, I now feel like I have a pretty good idea of the basics of IPR law, but still feel there is a need for more research around some of the more practical elements of the task of copyright clearance.  In particular the nitty-gritty or actually undertaking the process of copyright clearance.

We are working it out for ourselves…as we go…but it would be nice to hear a bit more from others in the same position.

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?

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.