To Support Unit 3.3 License Types and Unit 4. Using CC licenses and licensed work

Alecu, Felician. “Information Technology Trends , Creative Commons Licenses.” Oeconomics of Knowledge 4.5 (2012): 2–7. Print. (Bucharest, Romania)

In this 2012 article, Alecu provides a comprehensive overview of the Creative Commons licenses and a step-by-step guide for using Google Scholar and the CC Search engine for finding CC licensed material. His article is visually laid out so as to be easy to follow. Alecu himself seems to be truly impressed at how easy it is to locate not only CC licensed material, but material with specific CC licenses. I love his optimism when he concludes: “So it seems to be pretty easy to locate on the web a content that can be reused” (4). This says to anyone, stop stumbling around with permissions and deciphering fair use, because this material is easy to find and begging to be used. It is easy. There is no need to violate a copyright law. Get with it!

To add to "More scholarship about CC licenses" and to support unit 4.1: Bishop, Carrie. “Creative Commons and Open Access Initiatives: How to Stay Sane and Influence People.” Art Libraries Journal 40.4 (2015): 8–12. Web.

Bishop presents a cheerful exploration of the Tate’s mammoth enterprise to digitize and release into the public Web 52,000 works of art, many of which are still under copyright. Commonly, galleries and museums would like to broaden exposure to the artwork in their collections, but when artists or their descendants are still actively monitoring use and income, there can be a barrier between connecting the public with the art work and the needs of the artistic community. Bishop describes the Tate’s desire to license the newly digitized images under a Creative Commons license to provide clear guidelines to the public, but at the same time to respond to the fears, hopes, and wishes of their artists. The Tate decided that it could best realize its goal to "democratize access" and to connect the public with British artists through applying the CC-BY-NC-ND license—both making the images available and quelling the concerns of the artists or their estate managing family members. The article provides an interesting perspective to the discussion of “open culture” or “free culture.” Some of this freedom may come about in incremental doses. The CC license might make it possible to allow an artist to connect their work with a larger public, at the same time that it makes them confident that their work won’t be misused or appropriated in an undesired manner. Aart museums seem to have a difficult relationship with open access and Creative Commons licensing. The Getty, for instance, has a fairly complicated statement of terms that make murky all that CC transparency, so there is viewing the material and then there is repurposing the material. The result is that a slow, measured pace, while nurturing the artist along, may be the way to ultimately make CC and Open Access a norm rather than an exception.

Supporting Unit 5.1 Values and Practices

Boshears, Paul. “Open Access Publishing as a Para-Academic Proposition: Besides OA as Labour Relation.” TripleC 11.2 (2013): 614–619. Web. (United Kingdom)

Despite Boshears’s rather off-putting title, his article provides a valuable critique of the open access project. He problematizes open access by calling attention to the privileging of English (“enabling read access while blocking write access”), the conditions that one needs to have to be able to conduct and publish research, and the profits still being made by the for-profit publishers who are enjoying both the APCs and subscription models at the moment. He posits that we can easily call the “publics benefiting from OA … a fairly exclusive lot,” with their access to the internet, their ability to see and read, and to read English, and to be in a position to consume and understand published knowledge. Boshears’s is skeptical about whether OA, or OA under CC licensing, within our neoliberal economic order, can truly create a more democratized sphere of knowledge publication. Although he offers no clear answer or solution, the article is valuable for questioning assumptions that accompany our understanding of open access. His article gives us reason to stop and think, the important combination of actions urged upon us by the political theorist Hannah Arendt, and to clearly assess what we are trying to accomplish and who we are hoping to benefit through the production and dissemination of scholarship and to consider carefully whether and how we are succeeding.

Supporting Unit 1.2, Creative Commons Today

Pejsová, Petra, C R, and Marcus Vaska. “Free Licences and Creative Commons : A Powerful Tool for Open Access Publishing in Grey Literature *.” The Grey Journal March (2015): 89–98. Print. (Netherlands)

Pejsová and Vaska provide a review of Creative Commons, its history and mission, as well as an overview of the licenses. They then summarize the results of a survey that provides an assessment of the views toward CC licensing, the level of use, and the role of open repositories in supporting the use and distribution of CC licensed material.

Unit 5 (Adding new article) Values and Practices and the Benefits (and challenges) Joung, Kyoung Hee, and Jennifer Rowley. “Scholarly Communication and Open Access: Perspectives from Korea.” Learned Publishing 30.4 (2017): 259–267. Web. This detailed article is a fantastic introduction to the South Korean scholarly publishing industry and its gradual shift to a Creative Commons licensed open access. Joung and Rowley describe a distinct tradition of scholarly publishing in Korea, most of which is in the not-for-profit sphere. While most Korean published journals make their articles freely available upon publication either at journal or society Web sites or at one of the vigorous government or research institute supported open repositories, the articles have not been technically open access in the sense that they can be shared and reused. Authors have as a rule retained control of their copyrights although this is changing as more authors seek to publish in prestigious international for-profit journals. The Korean government is committed to raising the profile of Korean research and development and it seeks to do this through CC licensed open access. The medical repository KoreaMed Synapse requires all journals in its repository to be open access with CC licensing. Similarly, OAK, the repository managed by the National Library of Korea, requires all papers deposited to be CC licensed. This tends to be true for the major national repositories. Joung and Rowley describe the different journal models and the ways in which they are moving to a sustainable CC OA.

Supporting Unit 1.1 The Story of Creative Commons • Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing a Commons by On the Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0 http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons Ostrom’s neatly condensed ideas provide insight to the importance of the term “commons” in the thinking behind creating the Creative Commons licenses. Her 8 principles focus on a local, grass roots approach to creating a common good or a common use, rather than one overarching approach. Her principles include community involvement, in the original establishment of a commons, community developed rules and standards, community oversite, a system of sanctions for violating the norms of the commons. Ostrom is a Nobel Prize winning economist, which lends some authority to her views. The principles are straightforward enough to apply to a range of situations, from shared ownership to a system of norms surrounding appropriate use of publicly accessible scholarship.

Unit 2.1 Copyright for Educators & Librarians by Coursera Presented by Kevin Smith, MLS, JD, (formerly of Duke University) Lisa A Macklin, MLS, JD, (Emory University) and Anne Gilliland, MLS, JD (UNC Chapel Hill).

Smith, et al present this in-depth Copyright course from the perspective of librarians, which is to say, that they seek to empower educators, students, (and librarians), to use copyrighted materials to the fullest and most creative extent allowable under the law. I actually went through this course a few years ago. Its straight forward, digestible (Coursera style) doses, make for clear understanding. My colleague, Shawn Martin, led an “interest group,” which met weekly to discuss the series. As part of that, he made a detailed and useful outline for each week’s videos. Shawn has his outline available for download at his bepress Selected Works site: Shawn Martin. "Notes on Copyright for Educators and Librarians" (2014) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/shawnmar/23/. Smith, et al, claim that through this course, you will find out that copyright law is designed to help educators and librarians, not hinder them. You might start by taking a stroll through Shawn’s excellent outline.

Gulley, Nicola. “Creative Commons: Challenges and Solutions for Researchers; a Publisher’s Perspective of Copyright in an Open Access Environment.” Insights: the UKSG journal 26.2 (2013): 168–173. Web. Unit 3.2 (New Article)

Gulley, Nicola. “Creative Commons: Challenges and Solutions for Researchers; a Publisher’s Perspective of Copyright in an Open Access Environment.” Insights: the UKSG journal 26.2 (2013): 168–173. Web. Gulley, a publisher with Institute of Physics (IOP) sets out to describe and clarify the CC BY license for researchers who may be wary of making use of it for their own work. The Research Councils UK currently require APC funded OA articles to be made available under a Creative Commons Attribution license . This license is also favored by the UK’s Wellcome Trust).

Although this is a 2013 article, Gulley’s overview of the six licenses is still largely valid. The benefits she sites include clarity for the user, the ability to build on past research—the primary need for scientists and providing a nearly internationally applicable standard (something that has only improved since she wrote her article). Gulley cites that authors have expressed concern over maintaining control of their work over time and against derivative uses, maintaining the integrity and context of their work, and the compatibility as CC licenses are combined into a single work.

Gulley explains in detail the more weedy aspects of CC-BY licensing, and how to address some of the concerns she mentioned in line with established Creative Commons policy. In fact, IOP has adopted CC BY licensing for its publications (presumably for their openly accessible content) because the opportunities for sharing outweigh any negative effects.