HEA OER Meeting, London 20 Oct
Posted by christaylor on October 27th, 2009
A meeting of all lead centres was held last week in London to share issues and experiences so far.
Here are my thoughts on the day.
All slides/presentations from the meeting available here: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/oer/progmtgoct09.aspx
IPR/Legal session- Jason Miles-Campbell, JISCLegal
Jason led an interesting discussion on the legal minefield of OER production, and touched upon areas including:
The extent to which an institution owns its academics’ work. “Was the work created towards the fulfilment of their contract of employment?” seems to be the pertinent question here, though an institution may have specific points in its contracts over certain details; ownership of materials uploaded to its VLE, for instance.
The balance of branding on OERs. On one hand this movement is seen as a good opportunity to increase an institution’s profile online, and provide a good marketing tool to potential students, and on the other I can see there will be a reluctance to use OER material obviously generated and overtly marked by another institution, so a careful balance must be struck. - I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on this.
There’s also the issue that any institution logos that appear on CC-licensed OERs will also fall under the CC licence, which will no doubt infringe policy under a Share-Alike CC licence, if there is potential for derivatives to be made.
Use of third-party IPR works within your own (elements that are not covered under the Creative Commons Licence must be very clearly labelled as such).
The merits of a standard IPR Clearance pro-forma to enable prompt completion. This was deemed unnecessary, though recommendations on specific legalese to include were offered:
“I hereby confirm that the materials specified above were created in the course of my employment at the University of…”
“I hereby agree to the licensing of the materials stated above under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA Licence for England & Wales”
“I have not previously assigned my rights nor granted an exclusive licence which would be incompatible with Creative Commons licensing.”
“I confirm that all inclusions which are or may be subject to third party intellectual property rights have been marked and acknowledged appropriately.”
“I confirm that any personal information relating to a living, identifiable person has been marked as such.”
The grey area of re-drawing copyrighted diagrams was also discussed, the outcome of which was that whilst it is ok to re-present data in a form not previously illustrated, direct copying of an image or diagram is NOT advisable.
[Edit 3-11-09]“As long as you can show you have redrawn something, rather than just copied the original (i.e. ‘copy and paste’ copy), copyright protects your own material as interpretation of the original, as long as you don’t try to palm it off as the original - the changes perceived have to be more than just a few colour alterations and typo corrections, but at the same time can accurately represent the original. Such copyrights you have probably seen already, e.g. ‘K.J. Caley, after C. Taylor’ would be the format.” - Kevin Caley, Project Partner, University of Nottingham.
Proof of rights status of all incoming IPR should be documented and kept. An example was given of a Flickr image previously marked as CC’d subsequently having its licence altered to © All Rights Reserved. It was deemed that whatever licence was applied at the time the image was taken is the valid one (although there may be a burden of proof on this).
A very useful set of comprehensive notes on the session from Sharon Waller of the HEA are available here: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/oer/~/media/JISC/programmes/elearningcapital/Notes%20IPR%20and%20Legal%20Issues201009.ashx
SCORE Support Centre for Open Resources in Education
http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?name=SCORE
Based at the Open University, and only recently formed, SCORE seems to be aiming to position itself as another national support centre for all interested in OERs.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
I think that is essential that branding is maintained on OER materials. The Universities employ the academics and makes contributions to salaries, equipment, offices etc -t hey are expected to make matched contributions to the JISC funding. As they are commercial organisations, they are unlikely to agree to release materials if there is nothing in it for them. Prominently showing the source of teaching materials prominently is the least they can expect in return.
October 28th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
I agree the employer of the contributor needs to be clearly recognised. We have discussed this in the Centre and Chris raised an important point: if the logo of the host institution is included in the resource, can another user make use of that logo? What if the resource was modified but still carried the original University logo? We have to identify a means to recognise the provider institution without risking their reputation. A simple text identification may be most appropriate.