So yeah today about Creative Commons licenses.
Rocked up at Jisc this morning a little late because of traffic and the fact that I couldn't drag myself away from the video of Beyonce's halftime show and found my desk was no longer my desk. For some reason we couldn't sit in the corner of the office like normal but got moved to a big empty meeting room. It took half an hour to get all the technology together to provide us with two computers but we finally got started. The meeting room was a bit big and empty for the two of us but at least I didn't feel like I was in people's way.
But down to work. So a lot of OA publishing is based on the use of Creative Commons (CC) licenses so today we looked up what people understand about these licenses and how this affects people's attitudes towards OA. To get a feel for the situation I set to work trawling through blog posts, Twitter feeds and articles to see what people were saying about CC licenses and what questions needed to be answered. We used this information and Sam's research into existing FAQs to begin developing a CC user guide to help researchers understand how they can use CC licenses to help get their research out there.
What all this showed is that people are not 100% sure what CC licenses cover, myself included which is why I began on the Creative Commons website familiarising myself with the licenses. But underneath the general misconspetions about CC licenses are some more thorny issues. People are
Rocked up at Jisc this morning a little late because of traffic and the fact that I couldn't drag myself away from the video of Beyonce's halftime show and found my desk was no longer my desk. For some reason we couldn't sit in the corner of the office like normal but got moved to a big empty meeting room. It took half an hour to get all the technology together to provide us with two computers but we finally got started. The meeting room was a bit big and empty for the two of us but at least I didn't feel like I was in people's way.
But down to work. So a lot of OA publishing is based on the use of Creative Commons (CC) licenses so today we looked up what people understand about these licenses and how this affects people's attitudes towards OA. To get a feel for the situation I set to work trawling through blog posts, Twitter feeds and articles to see what people were saying about CC licenses and what questions needed to be answered. We used this information and Sam's research into existing FAQs to begin developing a CC user guide to help researchers understand how they can use CC licenses to help get their research out there.
What all this showed is that people are not 100% sure what CC licenses cover, myself included which is why I began on the Creative Commons website familiarising myself with the licenses. But underneath the general misconspetions about CC licenses are some more thorny issues. People are
concerned about the CC BY-NC license (which limits commercial reuse of the material) and why this isn't the standard license instead of the CC BY license. Researchers are worried that people will be able to make money out of research they are publishing it for free. They are worried they are missing out which is kind of fair enough. The main problem is that the definitions of what counts as commercial use are very fuzzy and while work is being done to come up with some definitions, these reports aren't making it through to the researchers.
The other issues were concerning what others are allowed to do with work published under a CC BY license. People are worried again that people are making money out of their work but also that the work might be translated badly or used for purposes that conflict with the author's purposes and ideologies. There is also a massive debate going on around what the license actually covers, whether it's the published articles or the research itself, and the differences between copyrights and patents. But the big issue is where datamining fits in with all this and I'll be honest I barely understand datamining in itself so this was a bit over my head.
So yeah, licenses might seem scary and legal but Creative Commons have gone out of their way to make the explanations accessible to everyone - "human friendly" as they put it. Another interesting at Jisc but I will admit that it's not my favourite topic and I was glad when Sam claimed the project and I was offered stuff more to do with perceptions and user attitudes to OA in general.
The other issues were concerning what others are allowed to do with work published under a CC BY license. People are worried again that people are making money out of their work but also that the work might be translated badly or used for purposes that conflict with the author's purposes and ideologies. There is also a massive debate going on around what the license actually covers, whether it's the published articles or the research itself, and the differences between copyrights and patents. But the big issue is where datamining fits in with all this and I'll be honest I barely understand datamining in itself so this was a bit over my head.
So yeah, licenses might seem scary and legal but Creative Commons have gone out of their way to make the explanations accessible to everyone - "human friendly" as they put it. Another interesting at Jisc but I will admit that it's not my favourite topic and I was glad when Sam claimed the project and I was offered stuff more to do with perceptions and user attitudes to OA in general.
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