The WLA Blog

Canoe the Open Content Rapids
Dorothea Salo, UW System Digital Content Group

• http://www.slideshare.net/cavlec/canoe-the-open-content-rapids [under Creative Commons Attribution license]

Instruction

• Digital storytelling - copyright issues over pulling from files found on Google Images - sets a bad example
• Scholarship reasons to provide copyright education, provide proper information sources
• Different from country to country
• Instructors tend to violate copyright, as well as avoid activities that are probably fine

Copyright

• Limited monopoly over original works that are fixed in a tangible medium (includes stuff on Internet)
• It's in the Constitution - not about making money, about promoting "progress of science and the useful arts"
• Life of author + 70 years; 95 years corporate entities
• OK to copy for scholarship, parody/satire, library preservation, classroom use; limited copying for other reasons = "fair use"
• You can: a) sell in whole/part, b) give it away for free, c) license it for free/payment
• Faculty generally fall into (b) without realizing it - they think because they wrote an article, they own it
• Fair use - only way you know for certain is if you're sued and win
• General guidelines do exist
• Legislation has become more and more restrictive; results - culturejamming

Public domain

• Prefer to think of things as "rising" into the public domain, not "falling"
• Google Books - includes items clearly in the public domain (pre-1923), others clearly under copyright, others are "orphan works" because we don't know who owns copyright (or if they're alive etc.)
• Hathi Trust will decide whether items Google is vacillating about are actually in the public domain
• Musopen - building collection of online recordings - raise money for your group to record a piece (long-dead composers, score acquired legally) and upload
• Flickr Commons - photographs in public domain; allows libraries and other digitizers to share and receive comments
• Project Gutenberg - one of the first; scanned, transcribed public domain texts
• Gov docs - work produced by fed employees in course of jobs is in public domain (except classified works); includes images
• State gov docs = depends on the state

Open access

• Includes peer-reviewed works, digital collections, working papers, technical reports, conference presentations, crowd-sourced solutions to mathematical problems
• "Green" open access - "self-archiving" (not really), repositories (Dorothea doesn't like the term)
• "Gold" open access - originally published open access, no subscription fees, no cost to access
• "Mandates" - FACULTY granting to their institutions the right to post their research results online (some places aren't considering publications towards tenure unless they're deposited in repository; controversy over whether open access publications are getting a citation edge); FUNDERS especially federal agencies want taxpayer-funded research results to be available freely to the public; LIBRARIES at research institutions]
• Biggest tool to find OA materials = OAIster (soon to become part of WorldCat); also DOAJ, Google, Google Scholar
• Open Courses - controversial - http://ocwfinder.com
• Learning materials - OER Commons, MERLOT (long-standing) - points to materials stored elsewhere, ODEPO directory
• Creative Commons - generate license granting specific rights for your works (attribution, no derivatives, non-commercial use, requirement to release the new work under the same license)
• Flickr has a Creative Commons search, or Flickr Storm has advanced CC license search
• Music (ccMixter, Incompetech, Jamendo)

To Do

• When you accept a work for digitization, educate the creator and ask for their desired status for the items
• Read all publication agreements, and ask for what you want - Dorothea hasn't heard of any publishers taking back their decision to publish based on copyright addenda
• Instead of libraries and librarians being the "copyright cop" - promote Creative Commons

Labels: academic libraries, copyright, open access, public domain, publishing, school libraries