RePRODUCE start up meeting
The Project start up meeting was held at Aston University Business School last month.
It was our first time meeting the projects and our first official event as CASPER. It would be our chance to introduce ourselves, explain the aims and objectives of the project, discuss the work that CASPER would be doing both with and for them, what they need to do and more than anything else emphasise the importance of early engagement with rights management and clearance as an essential part of a successfully managed project.
Before the meeting I wasn’t sure what experience the projects would have in rights clearance. Would we discover that they were all copyright experts with years of experience, who were at best disinterested and at worst offended by the perceived need to provide them with a dedicated team to help them?
Fortunately, we were met by an extremely interested and engaged audience with a wide mix of rights experience, but few of whom, in my view, felt that they couldn’t benefit in some way from further assistance. In fact we had a much longer discussion than I anticipated about what all manner of issues related to rights and rights clearance.
The key message from a wider perspective was that although there are clearly issues with the understanding of copyright and IPR in the education community, this wasn’t due to a cavalier approach to those rights. Rather more that there are misconceptions, misperceptions and misunderstandings about what is and isn’t allowed - after all an understanding of copyright isn’t a prerequisite for academics.
My favourite question on the day was, ‘Can you tell us who we should avoid?’. I suppose that for the sake of an easy life I could have given a list of the formats and rights holders that I think will prove to be the most challenging. However, I resisted the urge and not just because it would have been very unprofessional!
My primary reason was that right from the start I have been concerned that CASPER didn’t put projects off trying to clear the rights in potentially challenging materials. Yes, it is important that they take rights clearance seriously and are aware of the potential consequences of failing to clear rights properly. But it would be a failure for us if all of the projects engaged in some form of self censorship out of fear of making a mistake.
Whether we succeed or fail in clearing certain rights, we will learn most from an ambitious approach.
My second reason was based on my experiences in the licensing of online resources through our work for JISC Collections. Much of that work has involved the negotiation of terms of use that allow teaching staff in universities and colleges to integrate parts of online resources into their teaching and learning materials. Over the past couple of years publisher acceptance of these clauses has increased considerably. Now the challenges that we face are more concerned with the subsequent deposit, preservation and sharing of these learning materials, not just in national repositories such as JORUM, but also institutional VLEs.
Many publishers and content owners appear to fear the loss of control over their content that deposition in a VLE of repository implies, and whilst we in JISC Collections have gone to great pains to try and address these concerns we’ve never quite managed to over come the question, ‘But what do they want to do with it?’.
The CASPER project presents JISC Collections with a perfect opportunity to demonstrate to publishers exactly what academic staff want to do with their content and hopefully this will mean that publishers will be willing to grant JISC Collections more rights in the future.
My third and final reason was that I’m not sure that it is as easy as that to understand when a content owner will and won’t be happy to clear rights for re-use. I think that it will probably be more case by case, dependent on the quantity of material, the format, the proposed use and how that relates to the core business if the rights owner. My personal feeling is that the closer the request for clearance falls to the perceived business interests of the rights owner, the harder it will be to clear those rights.
Introducing CASPER
Well we have finally got the blog for Project Casper up and running so here is a brief introduction about what we have been doing so far.
First things first what is CASPER?
CASPER stands for Copyright Advice and Support Project for Electronic Resources
The project is being funded by JISC and managed by JISC Collections to provide advice and support in the clearance of copyright for e-Learning projects funded as part of the Re-Use of Learning Content call (RePRODUCE) funded by the JISC e-Learning Programme ).
CASPER will be helping the 19 projects funded as part of RepRoduce to clear the rights in the content they will be using and re-using so that it can be made available to e-learning repositories such as Jorum. To do this CASPER will be pulling together existing best practice in the clearance of rights generally and in e-learning materials in particular from sources such as HEFCE, the JISC IPR Consultants, the TRustDR project, Richard McCracken, the MLA and any other sources we can find and that are of use. We’ll be directing projects to that information, explaining it to them and helping them act upon and implement it in the context of their own projects.
Where necessary CASPER will create new materials in support of this, adapt existing materials so that they meet the needs of the projects or where it makes sense undertake the clearance ourselves, but the emphasis is on building capacity in the projects themselves and by disseminating the experiences of those projects the community more generally.
Capturing and documenting the experience of the projects is a key part of the CASPER project. Whilst we’ll be hoping for as much success as possible in the clearance of rights, the failure to clear rights can also be instructive. For example, how did publicly funded organisations compare with commerical organisations? How did different types of media compare? Why did some rights holders refuse to clear rights? What approaches worked in different situations? How much time and effort did it really take? etc.
Based on these experiences we’ll be offering recommendations to JISC and the wider community on the steps to take to maximise the chances of clearing rights, and thinking about the central support that organisations like the JISC can offer to help institutions embarking on rights clearance for the e-learning materials.