An extract of the IPR Clearance section taken from the STEMOER guide produced jointly by the UK HEA GEES, Bioscience, Material, Physcial Sciences and Engieering Subject Centres as a part of their OER Phase 1 projects.

1. The Rights Clearance Process
Notices
This resources is an extract of the STEM OER guide found at http://stemoer.pbworks.com/
It is licensed under the terms of the Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England
& Wales licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
Funding for this work came from HEFCE, via the JISC/Higher Education Academy Open
Educational Resources Pilot Programme.
The Subject, Institutional and Individual pilot projects ran from May 2009 to April 2010 and
produced a vast amount of open learning materials. The majority of these materials are
available (or linked to) on JorumOpen, and can be found by searching for ukoer.
UKOER Project teams contributing to this work were:
• Bioscience OER Pilot Project - UK Centre for Bioscience
• C-change - The GEES Subject Centre
• CORE Materials - UK Centre for Materials Education
• Open Engineering Resources OER Project - Engineering Subject Centre
• Skills for Scientists - UK Physical Sciences Centre
Resources produced by the projects can be found here: Resources
However this document contains other third-party materials under their own licences. The
licences and attributions are outlined below:
1. The HEA is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-non-
commercial-no-derivative works 2.0 UK England & Wales licence. All reproductions
must comply with the terms of that licence.
2. The HEA logo is owned by the Higher Education Academy Limited and may be freely
distributed and copied for educational purposes only, provided that appropriate
acknowledgement is given to the Higher Education Academy as the copyright holder
and original publisher.
STEMOER GUIDE IPR CLEARANCE

2. Background
When preparing OER one of the first steps you should undertake is a right clearance process.
This involves identifying who owns the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) behind a resource.
You need to know this in order to determine if you can release the resource as OER. You
need permission to release anything that you do not own the rights to. Also ask yourself if you
really own what you think you own.
We’re not talking about physical possession of an item but the right to control what is done
with the contents.
In order to answer this you need to know a little bit about IPR however this is not meant to be a
law lecture but an introduction to the major issues when creating or releasing OER.
Copyright intro
Copyright is a form of IPR that protects resources and this protection covers works that can be
described as literary, artistic, dramatic, sound recordings, musical, films, broadcasts and
typographic arrangement.
Type of Work Example Duration of copyright
Journal articles, books,
Literary, dramatic, letters, lecture
musical or artistic slides/handouts, pictures,
works photographs, images, graphs,
tables.
Songs, speeches, performances,
70 years after
Sound recordings pieces of music, any recorded
death of author.
sounds.
50 years from the
end of the year in
Films
which the recording
was made.
70 years after the
end of the year in
which the last of the
principal director,
TV programmes, podcasts, online
author of Broadcasts
seminars as aired.
screenplay, author
of dialogue or
composer of music
dies.
50 years from the
end of the year in The typeset/ appearance of
which the Typographic arrangements something, i.e. layout, format,
broadcast was stylisation etc.
made.
Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988 Section 1.
Ordinarily, we can be sure that:
- One word = no copyright protection;
STEMOER GUIDE IPR CLEARANCE

3. - One sentence = uncertain (11 words have recently be held to have copyright
although this may not apply to every case);
- Formulas/equations/recipes = no copyright*;
- One Chapter = Copyright; and
- One Paragraph = Copyright may exist depending on the facts on the particular case.
(* Slightly contentious but the reasoning is that a formula on its own is not enough to warrant
copyright protection. You would need the instructions/methodology along with the ingredients
and the right would exist in the whole work.)
N.B.
Unfortunately, due to the technicalities of legal drafting, the Act also refers to infringement in
terms of a 'significant' part of the original work. If you use a significant part of a work, your use
will amount to an infringement, but this 'significant' value varies with every case and, therefore,
every resource. There is guidance to the effect of the example above; however, if you are in
any doubt, ask your institution's Copyright Officer, Legal Department or Enterprise Office for
specific advice.
Open licences
There are many types of open licence; all enable the use of resources without payment of a
royalty or fee. Some are superficially made for specific types of resources, such as software.
All enable the licensor to stipulate what is permissible in terms of reuse, for instance if the
resource must not be changed in any way.
The licence should be embedded within the resource as part of the metadata so that users can
see the terms on which they can make use of the resource. Information on how to include
metadata with resources can be found in our guide here.
Further information on the different types of open licensing can be found here:
http://www.opendefinition.org/guide/.
Creative Commons (CC) licences are a specific type of open licence, used commonly with
OERs. More information, and the opportunity to generate and download CC licences, can be
found on their website http://creativecommons.org/. There is also a useful Microsoft plug-in
that can be installed that allows creators to automatically add CC licences to work they create
in MSOffice packages.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=113b53dd-1cc0-4fbe-9e1d-
b91d07c76504&displaylang=en.
N.B
In order to apply a licence you must be, or have the permission of the IPR owner.
Ownership
So... how do you know who owns what?
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 says:
STEMOER GUIDE IPR CLEARANCE

4. (1) The author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it, subject to the following
provisions.
(2) Where a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is made by an employee in the course of
his employment, his employer is the first owner of any copyright in the work subject to any
agreement to the contrary.
This means that the copyright owner of a work is usually the author, i.e. the person who puts a
work into a copyright form, the person who actually records the expression of the idea, except
where other agreements apply. The author has the right to control their work and the right to
be identified as the author of a work.
• If you write something down, you own the copyright in it;
• If you come up with an idea and write it down/record it in some form; you own the
copyright in the expression, i.e. what is recorded; and
• If you come up with an idea but do not record it - there is no copyright.
You are the author of the work, you put the idea into a recorded form and therefore are
entitled to control what happens to it.
However if the work was in the course of your job then it is highly likely that your employer
owns the copyright, rather than you (the default position). Your contract of employment, terms
of service or other related documentation should give details on the ownership of IPR in
materials created as an employee, and contracts do differ from institution to institution so
please take the time to confirm your position. If you are unsure, ask your Personnel
Department to clarify the institutional position.
Why is this important?
It is important because you cannot apply a licence to something you do not own or do not have
permission to release. These issues need to be identified before any effort is undertaken to
release the resource. Of course, this process in itself can be a substantial effort when trying to
convert existing resources for OER release.
When OER practices become the norm, many of these steps will be removed, thus making the
whole process quicker and easier. If you are creating resources from scratch, many of these
issues are avoidable.
Dealing with Third Party Copyright Works
f you see a diagram which explains a theory, a mechanism, a device or something similar in a
way you find really useful, check to see if you are allowed to use it. See if there is anything on
the resource that mentions reuse or any form of notice that outlines the copyright status of the
resource.
NB
If there is no information, do not assume you are free to use the resource!
You should always ask if the person you contact is in fact the owner of the rights in the first
place. If you do not get a response or if you get a refusal, there is nothing to stop you
redrawing the image, providing you do not copy the expression.
STEMOER GUIDE IPR CLEARANCE

5. The Humbox OER project has produced a very useful resource based on OpenLabyrinth to
guide you through the copyright clearance process, and identifying what needs to be done with
regards to content owned by third parties: http://tiny.cc/HumboxIPRClearance.
Third party Resources
So.... you've been through a resource and found some images sourced from a website, what
happens next?
Where any element of the resource is owned by a third party, permission is needed before it
can be included within an OER. See if you can trace the owner of the resource and ask them
for permission to use it in an OER and state that it will be released under a CC licence, or
similar. Ensure you retain all requests for permission in a secure location for indefinite periods
as you never know when you might need it.
A template email or letter that can be adapted for your purposes can be found at
http://tinyurl.com/37pcot4 which is based upon the advice provided by the Web2Rights project,
found at http://www.web2rights.org.uk/documents.html. As this is a template there are
sections that will need completing, or deleting for your purposes. You may also want to get
this draft checked by your own legal department before you send it.
If permission is not granted or you do not receive a reply you will have to:
Remove the material An option when the loss of this material does not
completely detract from the resource as a whole or impact on
the pedagogy.
Remove the material This is the preferable and sometimes necessary
but replace with an course of action.
alternative
The options here are:
• create a replacement - the advantage to this is that
ownership issues are simplified,
• locate a replacement where permission to use is
granted, this can be achieved by;
o asking permission of the owner of the
prospective replacement as before or,
o locating alternatives which are already licensed
for reuse e.g. CC licensed images
Remove the material If you are unable find a suitable resource you could
and replace with a always state exactly what was deleted so that users
web link to the original can look for it independently. E.G. ‘see (textbook
or other suitable name) by (author & publisher, ISBN) page .....
resource, if available figure.....’
online.
STEMOER GUIDE IPR CLEARANCE

6. Be careful of using content where no owner can be identified, or so called 'Orphan works', as
this does not mean that the work has no owner.
'In From the Cold', a report from JISC Collections Trust, estimated that there are millions of
'orphan works' and their lack of established ownership often prevents their reuse. Including
such work within an OER would risk possible future legal challenges. '[In from the Cold' http://
www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/infromthecoldv1.pdf]
Sources of Replacement Materials
Fortunately there are sources of materials with open licences already applied. For access to
several search facilities for open licensed materials visit the Creative Commons website http://
search.creativecommons.org/. http://www.jorum.ac.uk/searchOptions.html is a UK-based site
which is designed to host OER. Google and Flickr have very successful advanced search
facilities for use with images whereby you can limit results to those available for reuse under
CC licences. Increasingly sites such as Scribd and Slideshare are enabling users to filter
search results by licence type.
Summary
You need to ask
Did you create it?
Was it created while working?
Did you create it for your job?
Did you use your employers equipment?
Do you own it?
Is there anything in your contract of
employment about ownership?
Do you have permission to use it?
STEMOER GUIDE IPR CLEARANCE