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Legal Guidance for ICT Use in Education, Research and External Engagement

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Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources at JISC Legal

JISC Legal provides support for JISC-funded OER Pilot Projects. Support on offer includes:

Guidance documents
Use of the JISC Legal enquiry service
Participation in relevant OER events for projects

JISC Legal OER Activity

Open Learning Conference - University of Nottingham - 25 November 2009

Jackie Milne of JISC Legal attended the conference on 25 November to discuss and present on "Intellectual Property Rights and How This Impacts Education Institutions When Making Educational Resources Available Online". The presentation is available to watch on YouTube:

Webcast - Legal Issues for Open Educational Resources (OER) Projects - 05 November 2009

On Thursday, 5 November 2009, JISC Legal delivered a webcast highlighting and clarifying relevant legal issues with the creation and dissemination of Open Educational Resources. It consisted of a combination of presentations and question and answer sessions that provided practical and helpful guidance for institutions involved in OER work.

The webcast was recorded, and will be available shortly as an on-going resource. For further information please visit our Webcast page: http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/webcast.

JISC Legal at the OER Support Meeting, London - 20 October 2009

Jason Miles-Campbell, the JISC Legal Service Manager, led an hour's parallel session on OER and intellectual property law, with a particular focus on questions submitted by delegates prior to the event (many thanks to those who contributed).

The PowerPoint presentation is available for download, as are the notes kindly taken by Sharon Waller.

JISC Legal Session on IPR for OER - 13 October 2009

This Elluminate session focussed on IPR issues relevant to OER. The JISC Legal team was joined by two other speakers who kindly offered to support the session: Liam Earney, the Collections Team Manager at JISC Collections and Naomi Korn, a freelance IPR Consultant working across the public sector.

The event provided opportunities for discussion and interaction in taking OER projects forward. We looked at the following issues:

Employee created works
Third party ownership and clarification of licences
Management of IP rights
Licensing OER through Creative Commons

We also shared some general queries that have come through the JISC Legal enquiry service.

UK OER Support Meeting - 20 August 2009

JISC Legal participated in an online conference with the programme team and the other OER support organisations in informing each other about our activities, and discussing issues raised so far. It was a lively Elluminate-based session, and allowed us to see our work in the wider context, to get feedback on our intended work, and make links with other activity.

Open Educational Resources

JISC Legal recognises that the development of open educational resources (OER) will involve a number of legal issues, and its services are available to projects and institutions to assist them overcome potential barriers.

In particular, issues may involve:

Copyright law, and other IPR
Data protection law
Accessibility law
Liability for negligence
Liability for illegal content

OER and the Law FAQs

We are currently implementing an OER project, for standard content we will be using Creative Commons however, we have seen that GNU is the licensing approach that is recommended for software, is this the approach that you would recommend?

In short, software is copyright material. Creative Commons can be used in order to license any copyright work, including software. However, there are limitations to the CC licences particularly with regard to software and, where there are better licences available for your purposes (e.g. GNU), they should be used. This is because Creative Commons licences don’t make provision for source/object codes. This view is supported by Creative Commons themselves at: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/

Should we use a ported or unported Creative Commons licences for our OER project?

Unported Creative Commons licences are now on the third version (e.g. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode), and have improved quite significantly (the early ones were essentially US law licences, with some of the references to US law omitted).

We want to upload our OER to JORUM which includes third party material cleared for ‘educational use’, do we need a licence?

JORUM, the FE/HE online repository is accessed by named users and the repository is specifically for teaching and support staff. The terms and conditions of depositing materials in JORUM must be complied with and can be accessed here: http://www.jorum.ac.uk/JorumTCFinal.pdf.

If third party material is cleared for 'educational use', are we allowed to use it in our OER as long as we upload it online with a licence that states it must ‘only’ be used for educational use?

The terms ‘educational use’ and ‘educational establishment’ are contained in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. However, what I believe you are referring to is the term ‘fair dealing’ where the CDPA provides certain exceptions to copyright infringement.

A lecturer has paraphrased material from several sources as part of an online lecture in an OER. This is in their own words and based on their own knowledge of the subject. Does this need to be referenced or attributed in the OER? What about quotes?

‘Paraphrase’ has a spectrum of meaning. It is generally considered by institutions to be acceptable where tutors write text in their own words but where the meaning of the original text remains the same, see the University of Cambridge guidance provided at: http://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/teaching/plagiarism.html.

IPR FAQs in JISC Inform

A further selection of IPR FAQs are availalable from JISC Inform, Issue 26 - Know Your Rights: Intellectual Property and Technology.

Intellectual Property FAQs

These questions are based on queries posted to our enquiry service.

JISC Legal : Open Educational Resources

Legal Guidance for ICT Use in Education, Research and External Engagement

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Open Educational Resources at JISC Legal