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.
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