MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

No single legal concept can be applied to developing teaching materials and potentially OER. Typically an employment contract will state that employees (and contractors) will adhere to the organisational policies (principles). Policies are developed and maintained as and when they are needed, usually reflecting changes in the law. Procedures and protocols are developed based on policies. A policy might state how the organisation approaches something, a disclaimer will attempt to limit liability. Staff need to know what the policies, procedures and disclaimers are, so that they know how to act if, for example, a complaint is received (e.g. FOI). Individuals are responsible for ensuring that they follow their employer's policies (ignorance is no defence).

As sharing open educational resources is still very new, it is possible that there are few institutional policies, disclaimers or staff training in relation to using and sharing OER yet. However, teaching is itself well established and there may be relevant policies in existence. These are likely to be found in:

• employment contracts
• IPR and copyright policies
• organisational disclaimers about its products

The Web2Rights team have put together sample contracts, consortium agreements and permissions forms in an IPR starter pack for the OER programme. Many of these forms are linked to directly from the copyright section of this toolkit.

We are not able to provide you with a sample/template 'institutional policy' for OER because the clauses that you need to consider/include are embedded in existing contracts, policies and disclaimers. However we can highlight what you need to look for, or what you would need to develop/adopt.