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

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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.

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