June 17, 2010
Posted by AngelaTrikic in : Comms, News , trackbackChange in Copyright policy
Influencing a change in the copyright policy of the University is one of the objectives of the JISC SHARE project. This has now happened. The university has adopted a Copyright in Educational Resources Policy. This policy revision represents a significant step forward as it enable staff to create educational resources that can be deposited into learning repositories using a Creative Commons – Attribution – Non-commercial – Share Alike 2.0 UK: England and Wales license.
Assigning a Creative Commons (CC) license to a resource offers staff more flexibility in how educational resources can be used. It allows for publishing in the Learning Repository and making content open and discoverable. We will be testing out the discoverability of learning objects that are exposed as OERs and will report our findings.
The policy framework will serve the university well beyond the JISC SHARE and illustrates the sustainability of the resource sharing aspects of the project and a commitment to OER. As well as affording opportunities for promoting flagship university programmes it facilitates collaborations with external partners.
What is Creative Commons?
JISC has produced a briefing paper that gives a comprehensive outline of Creative Commons Licences. In summary:
Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) is a licensing system under which authors or producers of a work offer some of their rights to others to reuse their work under certain specified conditions.
The licence is attached to the content and is available in various forms allowing the rights holder to retain a level of control over how their work is treated.
CC licences have various advantages, including ease of use, widespread adoption, choice and flexibility, human-readable, machine-readable and symbolic representations of the licences, and a direct link between the resource and its licence.
Other benefits of Creative Commons include:
Citations and quotes are more likely
Adopting a Creative Commons license allows you to give permission for use and re-purposing so avoiding the need to deal with accidental infringement. This means that your resources are likely to be cited and quoted giving you and the university more exposure.
Less time dealing with Infringement
There has been a lot of concern regarding the interpretation of ‘fair use’ which has led to a cautious approach in relation to quoting and citing content. A CC license offers encouragement for reuse and is likely to increase the number of quotes because content is assigned as CC.
Finding stuff
We will be investigating the discoverability of CC resources for instance, using the Google search engine. However, we expect that content using CC-oriented search engines, is likely to expose work to wider audiences.
We will be disseminating this policy and supporting its implementation with guidance so all in all a good news story!
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