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Monday, August 25, 2008

More on Otago Polytechnic's use of CC-BY licenses for its IP

Sarah Stewart, Working with an open access intellectual policy, Sarah's Musings, August 25, 2008.  Excerpt:

A couple of things have made me reflect on how it is for me to be working under an institutional intellectual policy that recognizes the individual's ownership of intellectual property, and encourages open sharing of knowledge and resources....

Otago Polytechnic has a default creative commons attribution license to all its material and resources....

I have been very aware of the IP policy and I guess I have got to the stage that I take it for granted. But it wasn't until I attended the Heywire8 Think Tank on Friday that I truly realized the significance of this amazingly stance taken by the Otago Polytechnic leadership, Phil Ker and Robin Day. For example, I did not realize that Otago Polytechnic was the first educational institution in the world to take this stance with regard to IP. And it was inspiring to see how excited the Think Tank participants - e-learning leaders of New Zealand - were about working to make this a national approach to educational resources....

The other thing that has made me reflect on the IP policy is a comment Lorna Davies made when she heard the details from Leigh Blackall at the DEANZ conference last week. Lorna says
What this session did for me was to bring home the huge responsibility that this inverted policy places on staff. I appreciate that they retain rights over their own material but they also incur a considerable amount of responsibility....

Comment.  For background, see our March 2008 post on Otago's progressive IP policy.  Note that the libre OA policy only applies to IP owned by the university, and that the university does not claim ownership of faculty research publications.