At Central Lakes College, when a faculty receives a stipend to create or adapt O
At Central Lakes College, when a faculty receives a stipend to create or adapt OER, they agree to publish their material on the MinnState Repository, Opendora. In order to publish, you’ll need to know what type of license to assign your work.
Step 1: Terms of Use
Decide on the terms of use. Do you wish to release your work under Creative Commons license or in the public domain? Please make sure to review the difference between these two copyright terms:
- By releasing your work under a Creative Commons license, you retain ownership while allowing others to use your work (as long as they attribute it to you) without needing to ask permission of you directly.
- By releasing your work in the public domain, your copyright ownership is waived. It is as if you are GIVING your work to the public as a gift. Users may still cite you when adopting your work, but they are not required to do so.
Step 2: Seeking Copyright Clearance
Be sure that the work is eligible to be shared. In order to release your work with a CC license or in the public domain, your work should be cleared from all copyright issues. To do so, your work should be one or a combination of the following types:
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- your original work,
- built from open resources,
- built from the public domain,
- built from copyrighted work that you obtained permission to use, or
- combination of above works
Note: For any third party materials, whether openly licensed or copyrighted, those materials need to be attributed as not governed by the CC license you chose for your work, but under different terms and by different authors).
Getting Permission to Use Copyrighted Materials
If you must use any items that are copyrighted with all-rights reserved, please be sure to obtain the permission letters from the authors. Please find a sample permission request email.
A sample letter to ask for permission to use the work:
Hello Dr. Dumbledore,
I am a faculty member with the ____ project. The purpose of this project is to design openly licensed Science and Technology courses that can be taught face-to-face, hybrid and/or online. These courses will be freely available on the internet for anyone to copy, modify and use. One of the purposes of this project is to offer educational resources to regions where formal educational opportunities are scarce or expensive.
I am creating a course entitled “Advanced Potion” and I would like to use a post from your blog entitled “Why polyjuice potion?” from February 2005.
I am seeking your permission to distribute this material as part of our course. You will maintain your copyright but will be giving us permission to distribute this material for reuse as part of the teaching of this course. We will mostly likely copy the text of your post into a Google document and attribute you. A full citation for the work will accompany it, as will a statement of copyright ownership.
Please contact me at<EMAIL_ADDRESS>or by telephone at 253-xxx-xxxx with information about this request. Thank you