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Archive for April, 2024

Developing a Copyright Literacy Community at UCL

By Christina Daouti, on 29 April 2024

Copyright literacy – the ‘knowledge, skills and behaviours that individuals require when working with copyright content in the digital age’ (Morrison and Secker, 2015) – is an essential part of academic and professional skillsets. It is also much more than complying with licences and the law. It is about understanding how copyright came to be, what it seeks to achieve, whose interests are relevant and how it can be used as a tool to make knowledge more open and collaborative.

At UCL we have a service, a range of resources and an education programme to support and advise staff and students on various aspects to copyright.  This is informed and constantly updated based on feedback from participants, common queries that we receive, and developments that raise new issues to address, such as copyright in AI-generated works. However, to develop copyright literacy in ways that are most relevant and helpful to you, we would like to work with you.

Pointillist painting of four 19th century peasants, a man and three women, harvesting apples in a field. The man is using a long stick to get the apples down from a tree. One woman is looking up at the tree. Two women are gathering the apples fallen on the ground and putting them in baskets. A row of trees at a distance in the background.

‘Apple harvest’ by Camille Pissarro, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

We are setting up the UCL Copyright Literacy Community to give all UCL staff and students the opportunity to shape copyright literacy further. We would like to work with you to make the UCL community even more knowledgeable and confident around copyright. Whether you are a student (undergraduate, postgraduate, research student) or a member of staff in a research, teaching or professional services role, we value your ideas and experiences.

  • You don’t need to be a copyright expert to join: we anticipate that members of the community will have different levels of copyright knowledge and will learn from eah other. What is needed is an understanding of the relevance of copyright literacy in your area, and a willingness to embed it into your practice.
  • As part of the community, you will have the opportunity to advise on the further development of the existing programme, bring forward your own suggestions and prioritise areas where further support is needed. You will work with us to translate these ideas into projects that are directly relevant to your area.
  • You will be part of a supportive peer network that discusses all things copyright. We will provide enough steering and resources for you to take the community in directions that help you and your practice area.

In the first instance, we invite UCL staff and students to join a core community of 20 people. The first meeting is being scheduled in late June. We anticipate a broader community to develop later.

If you are interested in joining or would like more information, please contact copyright@ucl.ac.uk.

Related articles: ‘Getting comfortable with uncertainty’: developing students’ critical copyright literacy in the age of genAI, by Christine Daoutis and Hazel Ingrey. UCL Education conference blog, April 2024.

Copyright and your research: new series on UCL Open Science blog

By Christina Daouti, on 8 April 2024

An open book resting on a flat surface, with a lighbulb in the middle of the book. Scribbles of graphs, diagrams and text are coming out of the lighbulb, moving upwards.

Image by Freepik.

How does understanding  copyright support your research activities, from including copyright materials in a thesis or article to negotiating publishing contracts to text and data mining? A new blog series on copyright as it relates to your research has been launched.

Read the first post in the series for an introduction.