IPR, copyright, licensing, OER and attribution

How do I find out more about copyright, IPR and licensing?

The following resources provide a good overview of copyright:  JISC Digital Media: Copyright: An Overview: http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/crossmedia/advice/copyright-an- overview/  Bodleian Guide to copyright and FAQs: http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/services/copy/copyright  OpenSpires (previous Oxford OER project) FAQ’s: http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk/faqs/index.html  IPR and licensing module: http://www.web2rights.com/SCAIPRModule/. Includes a useful set of tutorials.

What are OER?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world. OER Commons: http://www.oercommons.org/.

JISC and the Higher Education Academy have produced an Open Educational Resources infoKit, available at: https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/w/page/24836480/Home which gives an overview of OER.

There is also a tutorial on the OER Commons wiki at: http://wiki.oercommons.org/mediawiki/index.php/Tutorial which tells you everything you might ever need to know about OER, including scary things like metadata and tagging. However, you don’t need to know it all, or do all the activities suggested to start using and producing OER, so you can pick and choose what you want to learn from it.

The Wikipedia entry is also worth a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources.

If you are a more visual person you may find this short animated film on turning a resource into an OER useful: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=CUVW5fhQP2k.

1 What is Open Course Ware?

Another term you may come across is Open Course Ware (OCW). These are high quality OER organised as full courses, usually at University level. For more information, see the Open Courseware Consortium at http://www.ocwconsortium.org.

What is creative commons?

Creative commons: http://creativecommons.org/ is a non-profit organisation that has developed a system of simple, standardized licences that give creators rights over their work while allowing users freedom to use the work in ways which is more compatible with the philosophy of open access and the reality of Internet use today. These are the licences that, by general agreement, cover OER.

How do I attribute other people’s materials or make sure they attribute mine correctly?

Attributing materials correctly can be confusing, especially as there is more than one way to do this. On the most basic level you could simply include a link back to the original source. However, we would also recommend the very useful Open Attribute tool, which can be added to most browsers and will generate an attribution for you. Visit http://openattribute.com and click on ‘Install the Addon’.

Current best practice suggests including details of how you want it to be attributed on the resource itself, so that users are in no doubt what to do. We recommend using the form:

This work by [your name] is licensed by the University of Oxford under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence.

Do edit this to include your name and paste it into any presentations or text documents you create.

This work by the Sesame Project is licensed by the University of Oxford under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence.

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