This is the last article of our Copyright and Open Science series by Christine Daoutis, UCL Copyright Support Officer, which explored important aspects of copyright and its implications for open research and scholarship.

In this post, we conclude our Copyright and Open Science series by focusing on open education. Broadly defined, open education is “a philosophy about how people should produce, share, and build on knowledge” (source: What is open education? Opensource.com). It refers to values, practices and resources that aim to make scholarship more accessible, equitable, sustainable, transparent and collaborative.

The UNESCO definition of OERs highlights the importance of freely accessible educational materials in advancing open education practices globally. This includes the creation and reuse of OERs—materials that are either out of copyright or licensed to allow reuse. However, open education extends beyond resources to include practices such as integrating open science into teaching, sharing educational practices, and co-creating resources with learners.

OERs include a wide range of materials, such as open textbooks, open access articles, lecture handouts, images, film, slides, lecture recordings, assessment resources, software and whole courses such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS). By default, all these resources are protected by copyright. If you’re planning to create open educational resources, here’s some copyright advice.

Addressing copyright in OERs

1. Know who owns what. If you are creating or collaborating on a teaching resource, it is essential to clarify who holds the copyright. This could be you, the author; your employer, if the work was created in the course of employment; or the resource could be co-owned with others, including students or sponsors. To license a resource for reuse (for example, to make it available under a Creative Commons licence), you must own the copyright to the resource and/or agree such licensing with co-owners. ♦ Copyright ownership at UCL is addressed in the UCL IP Policy.

2. Make the resources openly available and reusable. Once you are certain that the resource is yours to license, consider making it openly available, under a licence that allows reuse. Open access repositories support the discovery and access of different types of materials, including OERs. UCL has a dedicated OER repository, which accepts materials created by its staff and students.

As for licensing: we have explained in a previous post how Creative Commons licences work; and you can read more on how CC licences support OERs on the Creative Commons wiki. Licensing under the most permissive of the licences, the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY), supports the ‘five Rs’ of OERs: enabling others to “retain, revise, remix, reuse and redistribute the materials”. (David Wiley, Defining the “Open” in Open Content and Open Educational Resources, Improving Learning blog).

3. Address any third-party materials. If the resource contains materials you don’t own the copyright to (such as third-party content), you have a few options:

• Reuse works that are out of copyright (public domain) or openly licensed. These might include Creative Commons images and videos, open access articles, and OERs created by others. ♦ See UCL’s guidance on finding OERs and a reading list with links to many openly licensed resources.
• Get permission from the copyright owner. If the material is not openly licensed, you might consider seeking permission to reuse it. Be clear about how the resource containing the material will be shared (i.e., as an OER). Third-party materials included in an OER should be shared under their own copyright terms (e.g., their reuse may be more restricted than the rest of the resource) and this should be communicated when sharing.
• Rely on a copyright exception. In some cases, instead of getting permission you may decide to rely on a copyright exception, notably the quotation exception in UK copyright law. Using exceptions requires judgement. You’ll need to determine whether the use of the material is ‘fair dealing’: does the purpose justify the use? Does it affect the copyright owner’s market? Overall, is it “fair” to all parties involved? Be aware that copyright exceptions vary by country, which is important when making a resource globally available. The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources explores these approaches further, putting forward a framework that could be applied internationally.

Putting the copyright advice to practice: examples from UCL’s copyright online tutorials.

While creating UCL’s Copyright Essentials and Copyright and your Teaching, two online tutorials introducing copyright, the UCL Copyright support team drew on its own advice. Specifically:

• Copyright ownership and attribution were addressed. Copyright Essentials is an adaptation of an original resource, which was also openly licensed. Attribution to all original authors was included.
• Both tutorials are publicly available online, allowing anyone to access and complete them. They are also licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, permitting others to adapt and redistribute the materials with appropriate attribution.
• Third-party materials mostly included openly licensed images and links to lawfully shared videos and documents. However, for some materials, we opted to rely on copyright exceptions, which involved a degree of interpretation and risk. This was highlighted in the tutorials, inviting learners to reflect on the use of exceptions.

It should be noted that using proprietary e-learning tools (like Articulate Rise) to develop the tutorials restricts reuse. While the shared resources can be accessed, they cannot be downloaded or edited. Authors wishing to adapt the resources have the option to recreate the materials under the licence terms or contact us for an editable copy. Ideally, these resources should be created with open-source tools, but there’s a trade-off between the advantages of user-friendly, accessible proprietary tools and these limitations.

For more advice on copyright and OERs please contact copyright@ucl.ac.uk.

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Read more from the Copyright and Open Science Series:

• Developing a Copyright Literacy Community at UCL (UCL Copyright blog, 29 April 2024): An introduction to building a community around copyright literacy at UCL.
• Copyright Literacy Matters: Developing a Copyright Literacy Strategy at UCL (UCL Copyright blog, 14 October 2024): A deep dive into UCL’s strategy for copyright literacy across the institution.
• Keeping it Fair and Honest: How Copyright Exceptions Can Support Your Thesis, Publications, and Teaching (UCL Copyright blog, 22 February 2024): This post explores copyright exceptions, with practical examples for researchers and educators.
• Copyright and Open Science in the Age of AI: What Can We All Do to Ensure Free and Open Access to Knowledge for All? (Open@UCL blog, 24 October 2024): A discussion on the intersection of copyright, open science, and AI, focusing on access and equity.
• Copyright and AI Part 1: How Does Copyright Apply to AI-Generated Works? (Open@UCL blog, 21 June 2024): An exploration of the implications of AI in copyright law, particularly concerning AI-generated works.
• Copyright and AI Part 2: Perceived Challenges, Suggested Approaches, and the Role of Copyright Literacy (Open@UCL blog, 15 August 2024): A follow-up on the challenges AI presents to copyright, along with potential solutions and the role of copyright literacy in addressing these challenges.
• Text and Data Mining (TDM) and Your Research: Copyright Implications and New Website Guidance (Open@UCL blog, 13 May 2024): Insights into how copyright affects text and data mining (TDM) in research, including new guidance.
• How Understanding Copyright Can Help You as a Researcher (Open@UCL blog, 4 April 2024): A beginner’s guide to understanding copyright and its importance for academic research.

As we continue celebrating International Open Access Week, it’s inspiring to see how open access is shaping research and collaboration across UCL! Earlier this week, we explored the balance between collaboration and commercialisation, and highlighted the important work of Citizen Science initiatives.

Midway through the week, Dhara Snowden, Textbook Programme Manager at UCL Press, shares her insights below on the growing significance of open access textbooks and their role in the broader landscape of open access publishing.

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UCL Press is the UK’s first, and largest, fully open access university press. We have been publishing books and journals for almost ten years, covering a wide range of subjects and formats. In 2021, the press launched a new programme focusing on open access (OA) textbooks. I joined at that time, and over the past three years, I’ve been responsible for managing our progress in this area. As part of this year’s International Open Access Week, I wanted to share some of our thinking and planning around this activity and offer some musings about OA textbook publishing in general and what the future holds.

What are Open Access Textbooks?

Firstly, it’s useful to clarify what we mean by “textbooks.” Through conversations with academics across faculties, I’ve realised this term can mean different things depending on the context and level of study. In the broadest sense, a textbook is a resource that supports the delivery of a course or module. Textbooks can provide a wide-view survey of a field or subject, to be “adopted” as the main guide for study, or they can be part of a reading list that includes chapters from various sources, like journal articles.

Although textbooks were traditionally published in print, there has been increasing demand for digital versions of commercial textbooks, which can be purchased by individuals and licenced to institutions for use for multiple users.

Open access publishing, meanwhile, involves making scholarly content freely available online, removing subscription or purchase barriers. In the context of textbooks, this means students and educators can access high-quality educational resources without significant costs. OA textbooks are typically published under a Creative Commons (CC) licence, which allows for redistribution, adaptation, and modification, promoting a collaborative and inclusive educational environment.

The creation and uptake of OA textbooks has seen a sharp increase in recent years, particularly in the US and UK, with non-profit-funded publishers like OpenStax, collaboratively funded projects like CORE Econ, and platforms like Pressbooks. The Open Textbook Library, supported by Open Education Network, currently indexes 1,542 published open textbooks.

Why do we create them?

The UCL Press textbook programme was set up in direct response to issues around pricing for institutional access to essential e-textbooks, which were exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic. The current ecosystem presents an unstable and unsustainable financial model for institutional libraries, as well documented by the eBooks SOS campaign, which calls attention to the lack of regulation in pricing by commercial publishers.

An article published by Insights in 2022, ‘Perspectives on e-books and digital textbooks and the way ahead’, claims that ‘combined spending on book across nationally negotiated library purchasing frameworks increased from £55M in 2019/20 to £73M in 202/21, with e-textbook provision increasing by 281% to £25.1M during that time’.

In addition to concerns about affordability and sustained access, the Insights article outlines that post-pandemic, “shifts in teaching practice are accelerating demand for features that enhance blended learning”, with more flexibility and adaptability in resources being required, which isn’t being delivered by traditional academic publishing.

UCL Press’s aims to disrupt the current academic publishing ecosystem, offering authors and readers an alternative to the commercial model. This connects the theme for OA Week 2024, which calls for community over commercialisation. Bringing publishing back to the hands of academy, we can provide sustainable and high-quality textbooks to facilitate hybrid teaching and remove barriers to access for our content thereby reaching the widest possible audience and increasing chances to impact in scholarly communities.

How do we create them?

The UCL Press textbook programme commissions and publishes textbooks for undergraduate and postgraduate students across a wide range of subjects and topics. Every new proposal (and final manuscript) undergoes a rigorous peer-review process to ensure high-quality and relevant content.

Our approach is to collaborate with lecturers to create resources that provide high-quality guidance for students. Taking a personal and flexible approach to each project, we avoid rigid templates or a one-size-fits-all mentality, tailoring our textbooks to the needs of students and subject matter.

To date, we’ve published two textbooks. The first, An Introduction to Waste Management and Circular Economy, came out in December 2023. This textbook supports a module taught at UCL but also has global relevance for courses in environmental engineering, resource efficiency, bioenergy, and waste-to-energy technologies.

More recently, we published  Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies, an edited collection exploring the disciplinary debates, intellectual legacies, and practical innovations that shape contemporary understandings of heritage value.

 

 

Together, these two titles have been downloaded over 12,000 times in 152 countries and territories. Our forthcoming titles include, A Guide to Performing Systematic Reviews of Health and Disease and Fundamentals of Dark Matter, both due to publish early next year.

What are the benefits of writing or using OA textbooks? Where’s the value?

There are many benefits to writing and using OA textbooks and the European Network of Open Education Librarians have created a toolkit to encourage use of OA materials and Open Educational Resources (OER). Some key points are listed below.

• Reaching a Global Audience: downloads and views from readers across the globe, particularly the Global South.
• Cost-Effectiveness: One of the most significant advantages of OA textbooks is their cost-saving potential for both library and student. OA resources can alleviate this burden, allow to redistribution of saved funds and make education more accessible for all.
• Adaptability: open licences enable reuse, modification and adaptation, enabling educators to make the content work best for teaching.
• Showcase Teaching Excellence: OA textbooks can help platform new approaches or area of study, and celebrate examples of teaching excellence.
• Encourage lifelong learning: Provide students with resources they can use and reference after their studies and into their careers.
• Accessibility and Inclusivity: Open access textbooks are available to anyone with an internet connection, supporting diverse learners, including those in remote or under-resourced areas, and those outside academic institutions(e. professionals and policy makers)
• Up-to-Date Content: Traditional textbooks can quickly become outdated. OA textbooks can be updated and revised more readily, ensuring that students have access to the most current information.
• Enhanced Collaboration: Open resources encourage collaboration among educators, fostering a community of shared knowledge and innovation.

To measure impact, we use both qualitative and quantitative measures. Our Statistics dashboard shows the readership and reach of our books, including a map of access. In addition, we are collecting testimonials and feedback from academics and students and engaging with the societal impact of our books (as discussed in a recent article in The Scholarly Kitchen). We interrogate our user analytics to understand which communities are interacting with our content and how they are using it in their own work.

Value in this context is calculated not only in terms of cost-saving on commercial provision, but also in the added value student experience. This includes showcasing teaching excellence to encourage enrolment in a particular course or providing a teaching and learning resources for a module that are underrepresented in commercial provision (i.e. those with smaller cohorts/interdisciplinary topics/less mainstream perspectives).

What does the future hold?

The future of open access textbook publishing in the UK looks promising, with increasing institutional support and growing awareness among educators. As the demand for affordable and accessible educational resources continues to rise, the potential for OA textbooks to reshape higher education is significant.

Open access textbook publishing represents a vital shift in the academic landscape, providing a sustainable, equitable, and collaborative approach to education. As more institutions and publishers embrace this model, we hope to create a future where quality educational resources are accessible to all, empowering students and educators alike.

Significant sea change in the status quo requires a long-term outlook, and significant investment and commitment. If educators, students, and policymakers continue to discover and advocate for the adoption of open access resources within institutions, there is potential to foster an educational environment that fully supports and values accessibility, collaboration, and innovation.

UCL Press will continue to develop its programme of OA textbooks and to keep up to date with our publications, please do sign up to our mailing list or take a look at our website.

UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship and the local chapter of the UK Reproducibility Network are excited to announce the first Open Science and Scholarship Awards at UCL. UCL has been a pioneer in promoting open science practices, which include Open Access Publishing, Open Data and Software, Transparency, Reproducibility and other Open Methodologies, as well as the creation and use of Open Educational Resources, Citizen Science, Public Involvement, Co-production and Communication.

With these awards, we want to recognise and celebrate all UCL students and staff who embrace, advance, and promote open science.

Who is eligible?

All UCL students (undergraduate, postgraduate taught, and postgraduate research) and staff from any department/discipline, including professional services staff, can apply or be nominated.

Application and Nomination

You can apply or nominate someone else for the award by completing this form. We have kept the form as simple as possible to encourage as many applications as possible. You will be asked to (i) briefly describe the activity (max 200 words) and (ii) explain how the activity has promoted open science (max 300 words) for example by implementing open science practices, enhancing their adoption or impact, using open access resources in research and teaching, or any improvements to open practices.

Examples of activities include (but are not limited to):

• applying open science practices in research
• organising open science training/workshops locally or for a wider audience
• building and coordinating a community around open research practices
• supporting researchers with data management to promote reproducibility
• developing open software and analytical tools
• leading or supporting citizen science initiatives
• authoring or co-authoring open research guidelines, standards, and policies
• designing templates to enable open research practices
• developing open datasets or databases that are used by other researchers
• revise a module’s reading list to rely predominantly on open access resources/textbooks

Award categories

• Use of open access resources, including textbooks
• Activities by students
• Activities by academic staff
• Activities by professional services staff

Prizes

• Winners in each category will be awarded 100GBP as a cash prize as well as a certificate. All winners will be invited to briefly present their research at the Awards ceremony.
• Each category will also name up to two Honourable Mentions that will receive a certificate.

Timeline

Application deadline: Sunday 27 August 2023

Results communicated: Friday 29 September 2023

An award ceremony will take place during the Open Access Week in the third week of October 2023.

Thank you to everyone that attended the Open Access week session from UCL Press outlining their new project to develop Open Access eTextbooks!

The recording and the slides are available below as well as links from the speakers and the promised answers to the remaining questions from the audience!

Questions and Answers

Do the download stats account for partial views?

Dhara: For information on how we collect and record our data, https://www.uclpress.co.uk/pages/where-to-find-our-books-and-journals. Research has shown that, via the platforms that we work with the provide chapter downloads, most users download the single chapter that they require.

Did the project(s) around The Economy (etc) use an explicitly “Agile” method?

Luca: There were two parts to the project: a) the authoring and content development (CORE), and b) creating the platform over which the ebook is delivered (our partner EBW). For the a) part you could say we adopted some of the ‘agile’ principles, as we delivered some draft units early for piloting (to ‘users’ aka teachers) and then continuously deliver more units and rewritten older ones based on feedback. Also, it was all about the user and not the process, plans changed based on feedback etc. For the b) part this was more in line with the ‘agile’ method principles, as it was software development, but the biggest difference was that EBW couldn’t break down development into small increments because the final product was very tightly defined so there was a lot of initial planning as opposed to sprints.

Please could someone riff on things other than writing the words: editing for reading level, spot illustrations, internationalisation of terms. Would a UCL press book open doors to such services?

Dhara: We currently provide a full production service, including copyediting and typesetting for our books. Additionally, to ensure each new textbook is fit for purpose, we’ll engage with various relevant developmental services, depending on requirements of discipline and level of the intended audience. These many include developmental review, which ensures the writing style is appropriate for the reading/HE level of the audience, help source and check illustrations, review glossary and use of terminology and concepts (making sure they comply with relevant academic standards).

Are there any plans/resources available to produce UCL textbooks in other languages than English?

Dhara: This is an interesting suggestion, and we will continue to discuss as the programme develops, but, unfortunately, we do not have plans to do this at this time.

Resources

View recording on MediaCentral
Access the slides from the session
Information about the eTextbooks project
Access and view Economics textbooks and resources on CORE

Today, C. Yogeswaran from UCL’s Open Educational Resources (OER) project writes about open education at UCL.

What is open education?

Open education, like open access and open data, centres on a commitment to provide access to high quality education and educational resources to a global audience.

As the Open Education Consortium declares, “sharing is probably the most basic characteristic of education: education is sharing knowledge, insights and information with others, upon which new knowledge, skills, ideas and understanding can be built”.

Open education typically involves the creation and sharing of openly-licensed learning materials – open educational resources (OER) – that can be re-used and enhanced by the community. OER can include lesson and course plans, exercises, diagrams, animations, video or audio lecture recordings, presentations, handouts, mock papers/tests, reading lists, and so on.

There is also alignment with open scholarship, open science, and open society ideals which foster communication between academia and the public. It also inspires new ways of undertaking education by removing (economic, geographic, and other) barriers to usage, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to use published OER.

How is research relevant to open education?

Research papers, when openly published, can be used not only for further research, but also as a basis for teaching, providing practical, current, and tangible content to tackle discipline-specific questions.

Curating and packaging research-based studies, which include additional descriptive and support documents such as workbooks and educational guidelines, allows for focused and supported reuse for teaching. 

Such research-based OER can be used to teach research methods and, once embedded, can give students real-world and practical tools to learn with and use for inter-disciplinary study, increasing the use and impact of research.

Why share educational materials?

Publishing teaching/training resources (which can include student-generated content) will have wider global reach and impact, and attributing the UCL brand to your output should provide quality assurance for other users.

Published OER can be cited and referenced by others and can be included in publications (tying into the Academic Promotions Framework, which rewards open behaviours, for example), adding value to teaching and research, and raising professional reputation.

What are the benefits?

While the initial creation of educational materials from published research outputs can require some consideration, sharing these will allow the creators to promote good practise, collaborate with other educators and learners, and respond to UCL promotional criteria that require publication of educational materials.

There is some evidence that re-using high-quality OER is a time- and cost-saving activity, as one can edit existing educational materials to make content specific to a programme or class. OER use can also provide the chance to learn in different ways, i.e. a flipped classroom, and insight into the research-based teaching approaches of fellow practitioners in another field might lead to collaboration, inspire teaching and research, or contribute to original output.

Showcasing student content and feedback is also a great way to demonstrate the outcomes of teaching/training, promote courses for prospective students, and engage students in the publishing process.

Getting involved and learning more

If you have any content you would like to upload to the repository or if you require further information, please contact the OER team at oer@ucl.ac.uk who will be happy to support you.

To find out more about open education or to contribute to this practice at UCL, ask to join the mailing list by emailing  oer@ucl.ac.uk, or attend the next meeting of the open education special interest group (SIG). This will be held on Tuesday 11 September 2018 11am-12pm in room 712, Maple House.

We will also be present at RDM/RITS drop-in sessions if you’d like to talk to us or learn more about creating OER from your research data. Information about upcoming SIG meetings and RDM/RITS drop-in sessions can be found here.

More information about the project is available on the OER website, or you can follow us on Twitter @OpenUCL.