MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Everything that has been created is ‘copyright’ to someone:

• The owner of the copyright in ‘works’ is the person (or persons, if jointly owned) who created/expressed it, i.e. the author (writer, composer, artist, producer, publisher, etc.) or their employer

Some people permit you to use their ‘works’ and others don’t. Any copyright owner could sue either you or your institution, or both, if they are not happy with how you have re-used their resources. If you want to use copyright works then you need to seek permission (see the FAQ on seeking permission) or find out-of-copyright or ‘openly licensed’ content (for a definition see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content) described as open educational resources (OER) or licenced with, for example, Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/). For more information see http://www.medev.ac.uk/ourwork/oer/oer_intro/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources.

Openly licenced content is the safest to include in teaching and learning resources. However please attribute (reference) any content (as you would want to be cited, if someone used your works, see the FAQ on licencing your own learning resources), and include a notice and take-down disclaimer.

Figure 1. Illustrations of some combinations of CC licences; CC BY=attribution; CC SA=share alike; CC NC=non-commercial; CC ND=no derivatives.

There are several great places to begin looking for openly licensed content which can safely be re-used in teaching. Whilst Google Advanced Search (http://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search), (see Figure 2) and Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/) are good places to look for content, Xpert (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xpert/advancedsearch.php) harvests Flickr and allows you to automatically apply the attribution and licence information.

Figure 2. Google Advanced Search with the ‘usage rights’ drop down selected (March 2012).

Sites like SlideShare (http://www.slideshare.net/) provide access to powerpoint and similar files. You may need to login to SlideShare in order to download slides, but you can view for free.

Jorum (http://www.jorum.ac.uk/) is the national JISC-sponsored repository for teaching and other materials and is worth browsing or searching, although it is still building up its collection of resources in different disciplines (Figure 4).

Figure 3. Jorum national repository home page (March 2012).

Figure 4. Illustration of the Xpert tool for searching images, videos, etc. that are licenced with CC. Expert harvests content from Flickr and RSS feeds.

Figure 5. Sometimes you have to look for the more advanced or image search tools that will let you specify a particular licence.

For more information about licensing, see the British Academy and the Publishers Association joint guidelines on copyright and academic research, 2008 (http://www.britac.ac.uk/policy/joint-copyright-guide.cfm); the Web2Rights website (http://www.web2rights.org.uk/); Strategic Content Alliance (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/contentalliance) and CASPER (http://jisc-casper.org/).