Note to readers: I have been going through my blog and finding old blog posts that I had not published. This post was written in 2015 (I need to find the exact date), when I was working at Wits, but I have only published it now (August 2024).
It’s easy to talk about sharing digitised teaching and learning resources. It’s trickier to consistently practice what you preach and license your intellectual and creative output appropriately. But it’s almost impossible to encourage others within your organisation to use /re-use / revise, / remix /redistribute Open Education Resources (OER) when your institution’s Intellectual Property Policy (IPP) does not addresses issues relating to the creation of OER resources and the licensing thereof.
The mission of the Wits is to grow its global stature as a leading research-intensive university and act as a gateway to research engagement and intellectual achievement in Africa. This engagement with others (in Africa and beyond) is governed by Wits’ Intellectual property policy (IPP). At present the IPP takes an “all rights reserved” approach to intellectual property and the policy sets out to protect the university’s interests using a fairly narrow framework. While the intentions of the IPP – whether they relate to copyright, trademarks, patents and other claims for ‘ownership’ of intangible assets – are intended to protect the university and academics from being exploited by other interests, the way that these issues around ownership, trust, provenance, attribution and risk are framed creates significant barriers to the open sharing of teaching and learning materials.
If academics are to be encouraged to freely share their teaching and further development resources then I think that it is necessary that the policy reconsider their current approach to ownership of IP. I think that the IP policy at Wits needs to make a distinction between
• the traditional results of academic scholarship, i.e. textbooks, literary works, artistic creations and artifacts and
• the novel results of research such as products, processes, machines, software, biological technology, etc.
Within the traditional group, IP rights should remain with the author(s) and the University rights are limited to free (no cost) use in teaching, research, extension, etc. in perpetuity. With the latter, IP should obviously remain with Wits.
Some institutions have made this distinction within their IP Policy. In a presentation by Laura Czerniewicz, entitled Openness at the University of Cape Town, Laura showed how they had approached the issue if IPP and OER. Their updated Intellectual Property (IP) policy now specifically addresses issues relating to the creation of OER resources and the licensing processes to be followed.
Notable aspects of the updated policy are
• UCT automatically assigns to the author(s) the copyright, unless UCT has assigned ownership to a third party in terms of a research contract, in:
• Scholarly and literary publications Paintings, sculptures, drawings, graphics and photographs produced as an art form
• Recordings of musical performances and musical compositions
• Course materials, with the provision that UCT retains a perpetual, royalty-free, nonexclusive licence to use, copy and adapt such materials within UCT for the purposes of teaching and or research
While not wanting to deprive the Wits of potential revenue derived from IP, if OERs are to become institutionalised, then it is also necessary that the present IPP be amended to offer academics the autonomy to value their own creative output and decide how they would like to determine the worth of their resources.
Anticipated outcomes of the IOL fellowship
Policy within a university is crucial for institutionalising and sustaining change. This proposal to join the IOL is so that the project owners may be equipped to prompt and assist those policy makers, lawyers and other affected by Wits current’ IP policy to address particular tensions that are barriers to greater choice and openness.