Knowing what you can do with content from university web sites
It is recognised that though the licensing of electronic resources is essential for many resources, the time and cost involved in the negotiations and legal work, can in the case of low cost resources mean more money is being spent on lawyers than the content itself.
As a result NISO (the American National Information Standards Organisation) has been undertaking work on SERU (Shared E-Resource Understanding). The idea behind SERU is that publishers and libraries each agree to abide by a common set of terms and conditions for the use of electronic resources. The idea is that if a publisher says that use of a resource is based SERU and the library is happy with that then there is no need to get involved in negotiations at all (other than the price) and both sides can save themselves a lot of bother.
What does this have to do with CASPER? Well, whilst visiting projects involved in RepRODUCE it has become clear that many of the materials that they wish to repurpose and reuse are from other universities. Because these materials are often freely viewable on the university web site there is an assumption that it can be reused or repurposed, however, in most cases the university web site copyright statement, or terms of use are silent on the issue of use for educational purposes or forbid exactly the sort of use that is required by another institution.
Now I don’t know whether this is by accident or design, but I suspect it is because it just hasn’t been thought through and the copyright statement was the last thing on the minds of those developing the web sites. It may also demonstrate that institutions don’t necessarily know exactly what is being put up on their web sites.
The effect of all this is that it makes it very unclear what can and can’t be done with content that one can freely view. Might the SERU approach be applicable then amongst universities? A simple and consistent set of guidelines that would define the minimum of what another institution can do with content on specific pages.
An alternative to this might be to use Creative Commons licences, my only query with this would be that with currently six versions of the creative commons licence in the UK, might one end up with further confusion about what one could and couldn’t do?
The main point is this though - far greater consideration and consistency is needed about the uses that universities allow staff at other universities (and indeed within their own institutions) to make of the content that is available on their web sites.
The RepRODUCE projects will by and large be spending most of their time clearing the rights in content from other universities and greater consistency could save everyone a good deal of time and money.
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