Creative Commons has launched a new division focussed on education. It's called ccLearn.

ccLearn is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER). Its mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

* With legal barriers, they advocate for licensing of educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licenses, that allow unhampered modification, remixing, and redistribution. They will also educate teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education.
* With technical barriers, they promote interoperability standards and tools to facilitate remixing and reuse.
* With social barriers, they encourage teachers and learners to re-use educational materials available on the Web, and to build on each other’s contributions.

ccLearn will be in transition over the remainder of the summer, reaching full operation this in autumn. It is an international project, and will be working with open educational sites and resources from around the world.

Open Data Licensing: is your data safe?

Just a quickie. Those of you interested in the issues raised by data licensing might want to take a look at Chris Rusbridge’s interesting discussion of the area on the Digital Curation Blog.

Electronic copyright, IPR and access issues in the emerging electronic landscape

This sounds relevant...

Electronic copyright, IPR and access issues in the emerging electronic
landscape

ALISS One Day Summer Conference British Library Conference Centre
13th August 9.30-4.30

From the announcement:

“On 13th August ALISS (Association of Librarians and Information
Professionals in the Social Sciences) will be holding a one day conference
on the topical issue of electronic copyright IPR and access issues. It will
include presentations from ongoing projects and practical tips from
practitioners. The speakers will include:

• Copyright and data licensing;, does electronic differ from print?' Richard Ebdon, Copyright Officer, The British Library.
• The practicalities of copyright in the online age. Helen Bartlett, Copyright Manager, HERON.
• Rights and responsibilities: managing electronic images Grant Young Technical Research Officer, TASI - Technical Advisory Service for Images.
• IPR and multimedia in institutional repositories: lessons from the MIDESS Lesley Pitman, Librarian and Director of Information Services, UCL SSEES Library.
• Librarians against plagiarism: how Imperial College London is using PRS and active learning to combat the cut and paste generation. Ruth Harrison and Julia Garthwaite.
• Irish Studies Online - JSTOR and the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis, QUB. Norma Menabney, Queen University, Belfast.

Cost: £75 ALISS Members, Non-Members £95. This will include a buffet lunch
and tea/coffee.


Registration: Places are limited. To register contact: Heather Dawson,
ALISS Secretary, LSE Library, 10 Portugal Street, London, WC2A 2HD.
h.dawson@lse.ac.uk"

All Online Data Lost in Internet Crash!!

Checkout this breaking news.......

Building the Infrastructure for Data Access and Reuse in Collaborative Research: A Legal Analysis

Another one from the domain of open knowledge but this time from the other side of the globe….

Researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have released a report entitled 'Building the Infrastructure for Data Access and Reuse in Collaborative Research: A Legal Analysis'. This has been produced as a result of two different QUT projects: Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law and Legal Framework for e-Research.

The announcement explains that the report:

"examines the legal framework within which research data is generated, managed, disseminated and used. It provides an overview of the operation of copyright law, contract and confidentiality laws, as well as a range of legislation - privacy, public records and freedom of information legislation – that is of relevance to research data. The Report considers how these legal rules apply to define rights in research data and regulate the generation, management and sharing of data. The Report also describes and explains current practices and attitudes towards data sharing. A wide array of databases is analysed to ascertain the arrangements currently in place to manage and provide access to research data. Finally, the Report encourages researchers and research organisations to adopt proper management and legal frameworks for research data outputs. It provides practical guidance on the development and implementation of legal frameworks for data management with the objective of ensuring that research data can be accessed and used by other researchers."

I must admit that I have only scanned this so cannot give an accurate review but at 274 pages we can probably safely assume that it is pretty comprehensive!

Guide To Open Data Licensing

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) has released a Guide To Open Data Licensing.

This is currently on their wiki at http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenDataLicensing

The OKF announcement said:

"While attending XTech back in May it became clear that there were a lot of questions both about the legal status of data and what approaches to use when licensing it.
...

We started work on the guide in order to have something which could help answer these kinds of questions. At present it is roughly divided into two sections. The first section deals with the practical question of how to license your data. The second section discusses what kinds of intellectual property-like rights exist in data in various jurisdictions.
This guide is very much in an ‘alpha’ state, with much that can be done to improve and extend it. We’ve been working on it in the wiki precisely so that anyone may edit it and we’d welcome contributions — whether it be adding new sections and use cases or just fixing typos. So please, check it out and feel free to make changes."

So do check the guide out and comment or contribute (if you’re into that kind of thing!)