OER Community: Feedback re: CC 4.0 Attribution marking requirements?

Greetings Open Colleagues:

As many of you know, Creative Commons (CC) is in the process of creating a new version of its licenses - version 4.0. We have published a first draft as a starting point (available at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0_Drafts), and we are in the process of getting feedback to create and publish a second draft in June / July. The full versioning process will probably take until the end of 2012. For more information about the 4.0 schedule, as well as extensive information about the various issues being addressed and debated, please visit our 4.0 wiki (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0). If you have not already, please also join the license discuss email list where many of the issues are being debated (http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses).

We are hoping to receive as much input as possible from the OER community, and while you are all are most welcome to participate in any part of the 4.0 discussion, CC would like your feedback on the following questions about attribution in CC licenses.

Please send your feedback to me (cable@creativecommons.org) and Sarah Pearson (sarah@creativecommons.org).

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In draft 1 of v.4, we tried to simplify the attribution and marking requirements by putting them all into one section of the license in list form. This is designed to make it easier for licensees to understand and comply with their obligations.

Specifically, when sharing the work, licensees must provide the following information when it is supplied by licensor:

• Name of the author
• Name of parties designed by licensor for attribution
• Title of the work
• Copyright notice
• URI associated with the work
• URI associated with the CC license
• Notices, disclaimers, warranties referring to the CC license

(1) Is there any other information we should require licensees to provide when fulfilling the attribution and marking requirements under CC licenses? Alternatively, is there anything in this list that is unnecessary for licensees to provide even when it is supplied by the licensor? Our goal is to make the requirements extensive enough to satisfy licensors’ desire to be attributed and recognized for their work without making the obligations impractical. 

(2) All of these requirements may be fulfilled in any reasonable manner based on the medium the licensee is using to share the licensed work. This flexibility is intended to help ease compliance with the license conditions. Does the current language grant licensees too much flexibility? Not enough? Is there anything else we should change to make it easier on licensees that are remixing content from multiple sources – the so-called “attribution stacking” problem?

(3) If the URI associated with the work refers to a resource that specifies the name of the author (or attribution parties, if applicable) and title of the work, licensees may include only the URI rather than specifying that information separately. This is another attempt to make compliance with the license conditions easier and more flexible without compromising the needs and expectations of licensors. Is this shortcut appropriate and/or helpful? If the URI points to a resource that includes the other required information (e.g., the copyright notice), would it be preferable to allow the URI shortcut to satisfy those other requirements as well?

(4) Some licensors have more detailed expectations for attribution of their work. Should we make allowances for licensors who want to include specific attribution requirements (e.g., a particular attribution statement), or would this unnecessarily complicate license compliance? Note that any particular requirements would need to be subject to the reasonableness standard to be consistent with the explicit terms of the license.

(5) Another possibility is to change the language to a more general requirement to acknowledge the author and cite the original work. We could then include the current list of attribution and marking requirements as an example of best practices rather than as a specific legal requirement. This would potentially give licensees more freedom to adapt attribution to their particular circumstances, while maintaining the spirit and purpose of the requirements. Is this a proposal we should pursue? Why or why not?

We sincerely appreciate your feedback!

Cable

Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies... many "Open" chapters ;)

New Educause book: "Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies"

http://www.educause.edu/game-changers

Note all of the chapters on "Open" topics ;)

Please share, tweet, post....

Thank you,

Cable

Registrations now open for OCL4Ed: Celebrating 10 years of OER with UNESCO

Please help spread the word!

Sample Tweet:  Just announced free online course on #OER & CC licensing. http://goo.gl/rPutY  #OCL4Ed

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2012 is a significant year for open education and OER. We are celebrating 10 years since UNESCO coined the term "Open Educational Resources".

In joining the global celebrations, the OER Foundation will host a free online training workshop on OERs, Copyright and Creative Commons licensing.

When: 20 June -  3 July 2012 (to coincide with the UNESCO World OER Congress in Paris).

Where: Online

Cost: Free

Registrations for this celebratory online workshop are now open:  Register today to reserve your seat.

We are aiming to break our previous #OCL4Ed record of 1067 registrations, so please share the gift of knowledge and invite colleagues and friends to join us.

• Download a copy of the poster for the OCL4Ed Workshop (614KB) and display on local notice boards.
• Blog and share the registration link through your social networks: http://wikieducator.org/Open_content_licensing_for_educators/About

We welcome graduates of former OCL4Ed workshops to join our lead facilitators and assist with peer-learning support for educators around the world who want to learn more about OER and open licensing.  More info on how you can assist coming soon. 

We look forward to welcoming you to OCL4Ed 2012.06.

With kind regards

The OER Foundation team

COL Chair in OER at Otago Polytechnic

UNESCO-COL Chair in OER at Athabasca University

OCWC (and other OCW) in Money Magazine

UNESCO Open Access Policy Guidelines

A careful, thorough, well-informed, evidence-based and comprehensive review and analysis of guidelines for open access policy and promotion -- released by UNESCO and written by Alma Swan.Policy Guidelines FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND PROMOTION OF OPEN ACCESS by Alma Swan

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Communication and Information Sector

EXCERPTS: ...Evidence has unequivocally demonstrated that to have real effect policies must be mandatory, whether institutional or funder policies.... Evidence shows that researchers are quite happy to be mandated to act in this way... Policies can require ‘green’ Open Access by self-archiving but to preserve authors’ freedom to publish where they choose policies should only encourage ‘gold’ Open Access through publication in Open Access journals... The optimum arrangement, one that accommodates the needs of all stakeholders, and has the potential to collect the greatest amount of Open Access content, is for a network of institutional repositories to be the primary locus for deposit and for centralised, subject-specific collections to be created by harvesting the required content from that network of distributed repositories...

Also see page 39 / 40 of the report.

6.2.3.3 Creative Commons Licensing
The Creative Commons organisation has developed a set of licences from which authors or publishers can choose. Some Open Access publishers use Creative Commons licences to ensure that the content of the articles published in their journals are reusable in the widest (libre Open Access) sense: that is, they can be reproduced, abstracted, ‘mashed up’ with other material to produce new information, crawled by text-mining and data-mining tools and so on.

Creative Commons has designed a collection of licences to ensure that there is a suitable licence for every purpose. The explanation of these licences and how they can be used to best effect is provided on the Creative Commons 119 The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1535 (22% of the total 6873) (note the link show shows: 2162 as of 8 April, 2012) using some kind of Creative Commons licence: http://www.doaj.org/?func=licensedJournals. 763 journals (11% of the total) (note the link show shows: 899 as of 8 April, 2012) have the SPARC Europe Seal of Approval (which requires a CC-BY licence): http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=sealedJournals&uiui  The site has a licence generator tool for publishers and creators to use.

Where publishers and authors wish to make their work as freely reusable as possible, including by other parties who may develop new products to sell by reusing the material in some way, the most appropriate licence for the publisher to use in this instance is the Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ licence (commonly referred to as ‘CC-BY’), a tool that requires the creator of the work to be acknowledged when the work is re-used but does not restrict the re-use in any way.

Where publishers and authors may wish to restrict some forms of re-use, such as not permitting commercial derivatives to be made, there is a Creative Commons licence for these possibilities, too. The key terms of CC licences are Attribution, No Commercial, No Derivatives and Share Alike.

The advantages of using a Creative Commons licence over a custom one are:

◾ There is almost certainly a ready-made licence that will suit the publisher’s requirements, saving time and effort in drawing up a custom licence

◾ Creative Commons licences are easily understood and commonly used, so that a potential reader or re-user of a work will immediately understand the conditions of the licence

◾ The licences have machine-readable metadata, simplifying processes where applications such as harvesters and text-mining tools carry out automated tasks: these tools can recognise, by the machine readable licence, which content they are permitted to gather and work upon

Summary points on copyright

▶ Open Access requires the copyright holder’s consent
▶ Copyright is a bundle of rights
▶ The norm is to sign the whole bundle of rights over to the journal publisher, though it is not necessary to do this in most cases: publishers can go about their work so long as the author signs over the them the right to publish the work
▶ Authors and other copyright holders (employers and funders) can retain the rights they need to make the work Open Access
▶ A premeditated retention of sufficient rights to enable Open Access is the preferable course of action rather than seeking permission post-publication
▶ Licensing scientific works is good practice because it makes clear to the user what can be done with the work and by that can encourage use
▶ Only a minor part of the Open Access literature is formally licensed at present: this is the case even for Open Access journal content
▶ Creative Commons licensing is best practice because the system is well-understood, provides a suite of licences that cover all needs, and the licences are machine-readable ▶ Otherwise, legal amendments to copyright law will be necessary in most jurisdictions to enable text-mining and data-mining for material without an appropriate Creative Commons licence

Cable

OER in Brazil: An Update (Guest Post: Carolina Rossini)

By Carolina Rossini – OER Brazil Project

Post 1: Brazilian OER: Growth and Maturity

When we started the OER-Brazil (www.rea.net.br) project back in 2008 with the Open Society Foundations - which chose some countries in which to launch beta- projects on Open Education policy and capacity building development – very few people or institutions had heard about OER in Brazil. There were some early experiments in zero-cost online education and distance education – more on that in another post – but little knowledge or connection to the broader world of OER as something that is not just free of cost, but also free as in the freedoms granted by liberal copyright licenses.

Four years later, Brazilian OER is exploding, and gaining real attention internationally as well as domestically. The last few years have brought lots of good news for the OER space in Brazil, as we see new projects flourishing with regularity, and older projects gaining deeper traction through national and international partnerships.

A great place to start is the the Folhas project, an open textbook initiative that started more than 5 years ago sponsored by the government of Parana State and that has not only led to open books, but trained more than 5000 teachers along its way, improving research, collaboration with peers and authorship skill. And we see more and more universities joining the Open Courseware consortium, such as UNICAMP http://www.ocw.unicamp.br/, UNISUL http://www.unisul.br/unisulvirtual/home.html, FGVOnline (http://www.slideshare.net/OCWConsortium/ocwc-fgv-onlinestavros05052011mit), ESAGS http://www.esags.edu.br/ocw/ etc http://www.ocwconsortium.org/en/members/members/country/BR.

OER is also finding its ways from the south to the north of Brazil through more targeted projects. Great examples of include Mais Educacional (http://www.mais.mat.br/), which provides mathematics OER;  the Open Dictionary from Hedra (http://rea.net.br/2011/08/05/um-dicionario-livre/), a Brazilian publisher; and OER projects from traditional private K-12 schools from Sao Paulo, such as Dante Alighieri (http://www.colegiodante.com.br/rea/) and Porto Seguro (http://www.ocw.portoseguro.org.br/).  A series of new OER are also coming from projects focused on the production of learning materials on feminism, HIV-research and indigenous culture and education (http://www.indioeduca.org/).

OER-Brazil (www.rea.net.br) has supported many of those to understand and adopt open license models that fulfill both the mission of such projects and are compatible with the OER international definitions.  We also have talked to publishers about possible open business models that they could beta test in Brazil (http://www.slideshare.net/carolina.rossini/modelos-de-negocio-para-livros).

Finally, there is also very exciting news already in 2012. In the past few weeks three promising projects finally announced their launch schedules. During the first week of March we’ll see the launch of the LATIn Project (http://latinproject.org). This project will address the problem of high cost of textbooks for Higher Education in Latin America. The main actions will be the creation and dissemination of a Collaborative Open Textbook Initiative for Higher Education tailored specifically for the region. This initiative will encourage and support local professors and authors to contribute with individual sections or chapters that could be assembled into customized books by the whole community. The created books will be freely available to the students in an electronic format, and legally printable at low cost because there is no license or fees to be paid for their distribution. This solution will also contribute to the creation of customized textbooks where each professor could select the sections appropriate for their courses or could freely adapt existing sections to their needs. Also, the local professors will be the source of the knowledge, contextualized to the Latin American Higher Education system.

More great news is the launch http://eventos.scielo.org/scielolivros/ of Scielo Books , from Scielo (the largest open access repository for scientific literature in Brazil). SciELO Books http://homolog.search.livros.scielo.org/index.php aims to publish online web collections of scientific books published primarily by academic institutions in order to maximize visibility, accessibility, use and impact of research. Books published by SciELO are selected according to quality controls applied by a scientific committee and the digital texts are formatted according to international standards that allow you to control access and citation. The books are readable in ebook readers, tablets, smart phones and computer screens. All the books published through SciELO Books can be downloaded for free and are licensed, except where otherwise noted, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

Finally, on March 20th OportUnidad - http://oportunidadproject.eu/  - will be launched in Latin America through a consortium of universities (see agenda: http://aisantos.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/programac3a7c3a3o_lanc3a7amento_oportunidad1.pdf ). The OportUnidad project explores the adoption of strategies and channels that embrace the principles of openness and reusability within the context of educational institutions. The project intends to foster the adoption and pilot of open educational practices (OEP), and open educational resources (OER) in Latin America as a bottom-up approach to develop a common Higher Education Area. The initiative also opens the possibility to provide free educational resources for self-learners, in terms of informal and lifelong learning. The OportUnidad project is co-funded with support by the European Commission under the EuropeAidALFA III Programme.

These projects are just the tip of the iceberg in Brazilian OER. Though not all meet the strict, and important, community guidelines and definitions for “true” OER, they show the power and movement of the ideas behind the OER movement in Brazil and demonstrate the significant growth of the OER movement in Brazil in the past four years. We are really excited to contribute to such evolving movement and we will keep the working moving to be sure more flexible and true OER projects are put into place – from the classroom to public policy debate. 

--

Carolina Rossini
Senior Fellow at GPOPAI

University of Sao Paulo

http://www.gpopai.usp.br/

and

Coordinator: OER-Brazil/REA-Brasil
www.rea.net.br
*carolina.rossini@gmail.com*

OER in Poland: USD $14M for a National Open Textbook Program

CC BY: Self Portrait wearing my favorite Polska hat...

Sharing this good news far and wide.

Congratulations Creative Commons Polska!

Alek Tarkowski writes:


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Dear all,

We have good news from Poland.

Today Polish Council of Ministers adopted a  regulation concerning the implementation of "Digital School” program for computerization of Polish schools and raising ICT competences.  Pilot of the project aimed for 380 schools in Poland will  equip them with hardware (tablets, computers for students, additional equipment). Also digital and free (under Creative Commons Attribution or compatible) textbooks for grades 4-6 in primary schools (K4-K6) will be created (45 millions  PLN - approx. USD 14m -  is assigned for textbooks). This is the first major government project in Poland which creates Open Educational Resources especially textbooks.

All the best,

Alek     

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Well done!

Cable

Creative Commons: Version 4.0 – License Draft Ready for Public Comment; OER Policy Registry; New CC Video (CC Qatar)

(1) If you use Creative Commons licenses for your OER (or any other openly licensed creative work), you might want to check out: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/32157

(2) Please contribute to the new OER Policy Registry: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/32072

(3) New video hot off the press from CC Qatar.

Cable

How to Protect Copyright Is Key Topic at Publishers' Meeting (Chronicle)

Check out this Chronicle article.


This is the paragraph that caught my attention:

• Some of the comments, though, sounded more combative than conciliatory. Fritz Attaway, executive vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America, dismissed the arguments of what he and other panelists called the Copy Left, meaning open-access advocates and reformers who want copyright restrictions loosened. "The intellectual base of the Copy Left is pretty flimsy," he said. "Our industries do something that no one else can do. We create content that people want."

And so my comment is:

Fritz Attaway is mistaken on both of his points.


(1) Academic open access advocates are not asking for copyright to be diminished in any way. Open access and the open policies behind it do not seek to remove or weaken the author’s copyright … in fact they work to help faculty / authors keep their copyright.

Open access simply asks that publicly funded resources be freely and openly available to the public that paid for them. It’s a very simple point: when I pay for something, I should get access to what I paid for.


(2) "The intellectual base of the Copy Left is pretty flimsy" is a pretty flimsy argument. The intellectual base of open licensing (which respects and builds on top of copyright law) is
strong and sophisticated. Watch Larry Lessig’s 2009 keynote to Educause.


Maybe the Chronicle could host a debate on these important issues – a live webinar, perhaps?


And then we, the tax payers -- who fund the K-12 textbooks, the college textbooks vis-à-vis students’ state and federal financial aid, and the academic research, data and resulting journal articles – could listen and decide whose view we value more. I expect most tax payers will want free and open access to what they paid for… for themselves, their communities and their children.


I live in Washington State. My state government gives $65M / year to the 295 public K-12 school districts who then spend another $65M in local funds – for a total K-12 textbook annual expenditure of roughly $130M for a mere 1 million students. The results for our investment? 80% of our textbooks are 7-11 years (on average) out of date; and worse - students are not allowed to write or highlight in their books because the books have to last for 10 years. Want a digital version? Sorry – that paper book needs to last for 10 years because it was so expensive. Lose your book? You're parents will need to pay to replace it.


Might it be better for districts to adopt free and openly licensed (CC BY NC SA) CK-12 textbooks that are both aligned with Common Core and WA state curricular standards?  Every student could have a new book every year, with updated content, the paper copy costs $4.50 to print so every student keeps their books at the end of the year – building an academic library at home, and they can have iPad, Kindle, Adroid and/or web versions if they choose.


WA State policy makers decided their 1 million K-12 students deserve better and they have acted.


I know what model I prefer (a) as a tax payer and (b) as a parent of two public school children.


Cable Green
Director of Global Learning
Creative Commons

Big Surprise: Journal Publishers Oppose Bill That Would Require Access to Published Research

Chronicle Article
Eighty-one publishers of scholarly journals today expressed their strong opposition to the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act, or FRPAA. The bill, introduced as HR 4004 in the U.S. House of Representatives and as S 2096 in the Senate, would require the results of federally supported research be made public within six months of publication. “FRPAA is little more than an attempt at intellectual eminent domain, but without fair compensation to authors,” Tom Allen, president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a written statement. The association, along with an advocacy group called the DC Principles Coalition, sent letters to Congress on behalf of the journal publishers who oppose the legislation.


Really? That's the best argument the publishers have? See David Wiley's response:

• "Without fair compensation to authors?" Do the publishers really want to go here? The hypocrisy is so thick you couldn't cut it with a chainsaw. I've never received ANY compensation under the CURRENT regime. The publishers are in NO sense protecting authors' compensation by opposing open access - they aren't compensating us now!
• I'll tell you what would be fair compensation to me, the author, for writing a journal article - let anyone who wants to read my article read it. I don't write to make publishers billion dollar profits. I write for the benefit of my field and, by extension, humanity. An open access requirement like FRPAA is the best compensation I could possibly receive.
• And yes, when the public pays with tax dollars for research to be conducted, that same public that paid for the research has an absolute right to read the results of that research. Buy one, get one - when you buy a pizza or a car, you expect to receive a pizza or a car. And when taxpayers foot the bill for a research study, they absolutely have the reasonable expectation of access to the results of that study.

I also added my two cents as a reply under David's good comments.

BIG Day for OER!

(1) Today was the first day of Open Education Week: http://www.openeducationweek.org

• Please join the fun - events are running through the March 10.
  

(2) Today Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education and the Open Society Institute announce the launch of the Why Open Education MattersVideo Competition (CC Blog Post)


(3) Washington State passed its K-12 OER bill.

What a day!  Go Open Education!


Cable


... you know OER is on the right track when the Secretary of Education says: