PublishOER: towards a national policy for opening up content Hugh Look: JISC Collections

1. PublishOER: towards a national policy for opening up content Hugh Look: JISC Collections

2. Our objectives • “What is the scope for establishing a national licence or rules for third party content to be used in OERs?” • The principles and policy will inform JISC Collections’ strategy in its planning and negotiations with publishers

3. How we developed the policy • Developed example scenarios • Free open published content (loss leader) • Automating permissions requests • API access and increased granularity • Rating schemes and systems (social media) • Returning copies of mashed up content (to publishers) • Consulted stakeholders • Institutions, academics and students • Publishers, other commercial stakeholders and authors • Developed case studies in veterinary and health education • Documenting results and dissemination

4. What we learnt • Publishers are willing to make content available to OERs • In limited amounts • On limited terms (especially duration) • With links to source material • In anticipation of increased sales • Direct payment interesting but not being planned for • Contraindications in practice • Publishers much more cautious about third party rights than they had indicated earlier • Getting approval has been harder than expected • It is often not possible to link to anything more granular than the book • The prospects are limited by execution, rather than strategy, problems

5. Core principles informing the policy • That the policy should enable the development of rich, flexible and pedagogically sound Open Educational Resources • That it should foster the ability of all stakeholders to sustain their activities, both commercial and non-commercial • That it should allow new resources to be created using existing resources • That there should be reciprocal benefits to participants • That it should minimise transaction overheads • That it should be adaptable to future circumstances • Any documentation, including licences, should be easily understood by non-expert users

6. The policy in detail (1) • Publishers may make a range of assets available for use in OERs, but there will be conditions attached. • The OER should clearly add value to the assets it uses, rather than just reproduce a collection of assets from one or more sources. • What can be done with the asset will be defined in a licence. • Licences will have defined periods. • Licences may be granted on a case-by-case basis for the time being. Creators of OERs will be expected to seek permission from the asset owner to use the asset in an OER. • Wherever possible, licences will allow users to modify the assets as well as include them in new works and mashups. • Creators of OER resources will respect any limits to the number of assets they can use from any published work.

7. The policy in detail (2) • Assets will always be attributed to their source, and a link provided to the source. • Assets will be marked with their own individual licence when included in the OER. • In the case of any individual asset, the licence for the asset will take precedence over the licence for the OER. • Publishers may licence the asset for use in one defined OER, and reserve all further rights. • Assets may be made available in lower-quality version for re-use from those used in the source publication. • Any alteration to embedded materials (including simple file format transformations) should be indicated. • Creators of an OER will remove it from the OER on request from the licensor. • A licensor whose assets have been used in an OER will have the right to reuse open-licensed elements of the OER on a commercial basis (contentious) • Information about the end-usage of assets in an OER should be available to the licensor of the asset.

8. Contact information Hugh Look http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk hugh.look@jisc-collections.ac.uk