JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 1

Lessons and Reflections from RepRODUCEJISC CETIS Educational Content SIG - OER meeting

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 2

Lesson and reflections from REPRODUCE

JISC CETIS Educational Content SIG - OER meeting

Liam Earney

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 3

About CASPER

Have we learnt any lessons as a result of this?

– Some findings from survey

What are the implications for the OER programme?

Introduction

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 4

Aims and Objectives

Square. Circle. Facets by http://snow.ipernity.comhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/

deed.en_GB

Copyright all rights reserved symbols (white on black and black on white) http://flickr.com/photos/mikeblogs/3020966666/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en_GB

≠

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 5

Was it worth it?

How important an issue was IPR impacting the success of their project?

– 89% of projects found it was somewhat, very or critically important

• 45% said it was critical

How helpful was support received from CASPER?

– 100% found CASPER’s support Very or Critically helpful

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 6

What recommendations would you now make to staff dealing with IPR issues?

“try and avoid it from outset “

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 7

Lessons Learnt

Wider context

– Balance between legitimate claims of content owners, creators and users

Lessons at the JISC level

– Put in place support infrastructures in advance of projects

Lessons at the cross-institutional level

– Getting buy in from multiple institutions and fulfilment of responsibilities is hard when licensing is involved

Lessons at the institutional level

– Conflicting and contradictory attitudes towards content creation, ownership and dissemination – who’s responsible?

– Are the workflows and infrastructure in place to support use and re-use?

Lessons at the departmental and academic level

– What can and should be made available? For what purposes? How long?

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 8

Lessons learnt

Public sector needs to get it’s own house in order

– Only 14% of Reproduce projects found it easy to clear rights from other UK universities

– 100% found it somewhat or very challenging to clear them from other Public sector organisations

– Rights status of content created and hosted by is often unclear – staff have moved, lack of policy, lack of documentation

• Gentleman’s agreements vs formal arrangements

– Generally an absence of clear rights statements especially around non-personal educational use

• Ambivalence and opposition to permission for use and re-use

– Universities will want to be paid to clear up rights issues

– Identifying people with responsibility and ability to grant permissions and make decisions

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 9

Lessons learnt

Lack of commonly accepted terminology and narrative

– What do we mean by re-purpose and re-use?

– What do we mean by open?

• BBC

• CETLs

– How do other academics feel about use and re-use of their materials?

And if we don’t how can we explain it to anyone else?

– Explaining to rights owners what projects were doing and how rights owners processed these responses

• ‘I presume this is a joke’

In 62.5% of cases where permission was refused it was due to the type of rights that were being sought

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 10

Lessons learnt

Are academic timetables and rights clearance timetables compatible?

– This is a time consuming and as a result costly exercise

– “All this on top of everything else”

How long did RePRODUCE projects spend on rights clearance:

– “About 10 hours”

– “Months of negotiations”

– “10 person weeks including identifying rights holders. This will increase as still chasing copyright”

– “Very hard to say state clearly as this wasn't monitored, from the start, by all the team members.”

– “Only really addressing this issue now”

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 11

Lessons Learnt

Is it enough to provide templates without additional support and expertise to adapt them for institutional needs?

– Model rights clearance letters seen as much more helpful than licences

• Are licences too ‘un-friendly’?

• Require some expertise and experience

– Some evidence that other materials provided were under used/ignored

• Either processes already in place

• Lack of engagement/record keeping of rights clearance

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 12

Lessons learnt

What advice would they give to JISC?

– Don’t fund the creation of content where use and re-use isn’t allowed

– Develop workflows that map the process an academic would undertake

– Work with institutions to ensure that there is much greater certainty about who can grant what to whom

– Provide more guidance on where to find resources that are in the public domain and don't require rights clearance.

– Develop subject specific copyright tools and consent forms e.g. medicine and healthcare

– Take the burden off projects and handle all IPR for JISC projects

• How many institutions can sustain this activity?

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 13

Are there implications for the Open Educational Resources Programme?

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 14

Implications for OER Programme?

There has never been a better time to stimulate and support the provision of freely available content

– Financial and economic crisis will mean significant cuts in institutional expenditure on licensed content

Provision of a critical mass of OER is absolutely essential for the widespread embedding of use and re-use

Putting in place the licensing requirements at the start and keeping variation to a minimum will be essential to long term success

Discoverability of those resources will be essential

Risk management and acceptance

Moral rights and acknowledgement of the content creators

Sustainability - how does one develop the communities of users around these resources that will keep them up to date, available and used

Use beyond HE? Schools can’t use Flickr, YouTube etc

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 15

Implications for OER Programme?

≠

JISC Collections 9 April 2023 | CASPER | Slide 16

Thank you

Contact Details

– Liam Earney – L.Earney@jisc.ac.uk Tel: 0203 3006 6002

Any Questions?