Professor Anne Fitzgerald and Neale Hooper
Queensland University of Technology Law Faculty
Creative Commons Australia
Creative Commons and Innovation
QUT, Brisbane
1 February 2013
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia.
Public sector components
 Government
 Federal
 State
 Local
 Education
 Secondary
 Tertiary
 Research
 Publicly-funded research institutes
 Government agencies e.g. CSIRO
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Creating information flows
 Complexity of information pathways:
 within government – among departments, agencies, different levels
of government; between government and community:

from government to community; from community to government to
community; from local to national to global
 Problem of “licence logjams”
 Copyright has been relied on by governments to control access (to
prevent flow of information or to preserve commercial rights)
 Often, there is no licence, so access/use/reuse rights are unknown –
high transaction cost of negotiating new licences
 Where licences exist, terms are incomprehensible or inconsistent
 Promoting the flow of information requires appropriate
policy frameworks and licensing practices
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Towards an information policy
 From 2005 on –
 reviews of government information access and reuse practices





Queensland Government Information Licensing
Framework (GILF) report (2006)
Cutler review (2008)
Victorian Parliament review of access to PSI (2009)
Government 2.0 Taskforce (2009)
Lawrence (UK Ordnance Survey) reviews of spatial policy
and practices (2011)
 reform of Freedom of Information (FoI) schemes –
introduction of Right to Information (RTI) proactive
disclosure principles and practices (2009 on)
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Commonwealth Government’s
Statement of IP Principles (2010)
 11.(b) Consistent with the need for free and open re-use and adaptation,
public sector information should be licensed by agencies under the
Creative Commons BY standard as the default.
 An agency’s starting position when determining how to license its public sector
information should be to consider Creative Commons licences
(http://creativecommons.org.au/) or other open content licences.
 Agencies should license their public sector information under a Creative
Commons licence or other open content licence following a process of due
diligence and on a case-by-case basis.
 Before releasing public sector information, for which the Commonwealth is not
the sole copyright owner, under a Creative Commons BY standard or another
open content licence, an agency may need to negotiate with any other
copyright owners of the material.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Australian Government Attorney General’s
IP Guidelines and IP Manual (2012)
 In 2012, the Australian Government released two documents which
implement the Statement of IP Principles for Australian Government
Agencies:
 Guidelines on Licensing Public Sector Information for Australian
Government Agencies;
 Australian Government Intellectual Property Manual (IP Manual).
 Both documents are available on the Attorney-General’s Department
website under the CC BY 3.0 Australian licence.
 Attorney General’s IP Manual makes it clear that PSI should be
released by default free of charge under a Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) Australian licence by default. (Chapter 9 “Sharing and Granting Public Access to IP”)
 Agencies are now required to make licensing decisions about
whether to use Creative Commons licences (or other open
content licences) when publicly releasing their PSI.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Queensland IP Principles (2011)
 Queensland Government IP Principles (revised 2011) endorse the use of
CC licences and specify that the CC BY licence is the default licence,
to be applied as a first choice unless there are clear indicators that
the default licence is inappropriate in the circumstances:
Clause 1.3: Creative Commons licensing of government copyright
information
 In assessing the appropriate licence to apply to public information, the
Government Information Licensing Framework (GILF) mandates that:
(a) agencies license their public sector copyright information using the
Creative Commons least restrictive licence (i.e. the Attribution BY
licence) as the default licence of preference following a process of due
diligence assessment on a case-by-case basis. However this least
restrictive licence may not always be the appropriate licence to use.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Premier’s message at
http://data.qld.gov.au/about
 “So that people using our data can do so effectively,
agencies must provide it in a standard way. Agencies
will:
 follow metadata standards
 apply clear licences (preferably open licences such as
Creative Commons)
 assess and advise of data quality
 outline any limitations on data use.”
AUSTRALIA
Geoscience Australia - Landsat 8 data
 Landsat 8 satellite to be launched in early 2013 - GA will
make the satellite images publicly available free of charge,
under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Austalia
licence (CC BY) to facilitate legal reuse of the images
 Jeff Kingwell, Section Leader of GA’s National Earth
Observation Group :
Our experience is that using the Creative
Commons Attribution Licence – which is the
default licence for GA information – makes the
data more useful and easier to apply. For
example, to help the Indonesian government to
monitor forest management, GA supplies Landsat
data from a number of foreign data archives. Since
we can apply the same licence conditions to each
data source, the information is much more useful
and easier to share and reuse.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Example of a Landsat 7 image, CC BY 3.0 Au
© Geoscience Australia
OER and MOOCs
The concept of “OER”
 The OECD defines OER as:
 ‘digitised materials
 offered freely and openly
 for educators, students, and self-learners
 to use and reuse
 for teaching, learning and research.
OER includes learning content, software tools to develop,
use and distribute content, and implementation
resources such as open licences.’

OECD, “Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open
Educational Resources”, OECD, Paris, 2007, at p 38, available at
www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/7/38654317.pdf.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
The case for OER
 “Nearly one-third of the world’s
population (29.3%) is under 15. Today
there are 165 million people enrolled in
tertiary education1. Projections suggest
that that participation will peak at 263
million2 in 2025.
 Accommodating the additional 98
million students would require more
than four major universities (30,000
students) to open every week for the
next fifteen years.”
Sir John Daniel, Commonwealth of Learning
(COL), ‘Tertiary Education: How Open?’,
20 May 2011 at
http://www.col.org/resources/speeches/2011pr
esentation/Pages/2011-05-19b.aspx.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Storm Trooper by Maximus_W,
licensed under CC BY2.0 Generic ,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/2395033
5@N07/6032572260
MOOC ≠ OER
 David Wiley:
“There are a number of reasons why the term MOOC is a misnomer.
- Many MOOCs are massive but not open (e.g.,
http://www.udacity.com/legal/)
- Many MOOCs are open but not massive (e.g.,
http://learninganalytics.net/syllabus.html)
- Many MOOCs try very hard not to be courses (e.g.,
http://cck11.mooc.ca/how.htm)
…
Bonus complaint: The MOOCs which are “massive but not
open” pose a special threat to the future of OER, but no one
seems to be paying attention… Before long the general public will
feel that “free” is good / innovative enough, and no one will care
about “open,” permissions, or licensing. The good has once again
become the enemy of the best. And how to you wage a PR war
against “the good?”

‘The MOOC Misnomer’, 1 July 2012, http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2436
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Reuse, remix, distribution are at
the heart of OER
 The OpenCourseWare Consortium identifies the
relevant acts that need to be able to be performed with
OER as:
 Reuse: using the work verbatim;
 Rework: altering or transforming the work;
 Remix: combining the verbatim or altered work with
other works; and
 Redistribute: share the verbatim work, the reworked
work, or the remixed work with others.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
MIT OpenCourseware
 Global adoption and influence:
 Taiwan

Opensource OpenCourseWare Prototype System (OOPS)
project copied the entire MIT OCW site to a local Taiwanese
server and translated the courses into Chinese
 China

China Open Resources for Education (CORE) project, a nonprofit consortium of universities established in 2003, began its
OER efforts by translating MIT’s OCW
 Latin America

Universia, the largest Spanish and Portuguese speaking
network of universities, translated MIT’s OCW courses into
Spanish and Portugese, to make the content accessible to their
local communities.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Khan Academy
Khan Academy - ToS
7. Licensed Educational Content.
 7.1 …Unless otherwise indicated, all Licensed Educational Content
is the property of Khan Academy or its subsidiaries or affiliated
companies and/or third-party licensors and, subject to the terms and
conditions of these Terms, is licensed to You under the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United
States License (available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-sa/3.0/us/) (the “Creative Commons License”). …
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Blackboard xpLor
 xpLor is a new cloud-based learning object repository
that will work across the various learning
management systems (LMS) in use at educational
institutions
 Objective is to dissolve content boundaries between
LMS’s and institutions so that instructors can more
easily share, discover, and reuse course content.
 xpLor has CC licensing options - instructors and
institutions can create, share, and build on each
other’s CC-licensed content through the same
interface.
Blackboard xpLor – CC BY default
The future of OER
 Increased direct funding from government for the
creation of OER
Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College
and Career Training Grant Program (TAACCCT):
US $2 billion in funding provided under federal education
fund to create OER resources for use in community colleges
P062311PS-0339 by The White House (US Government Work) http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/5937200216
California digital textbooks project
 Legislative implementation of OER policy
 In September 2012, California Governor Jerry Brown
signed two bills providing for the creation of free,
openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most
popular lower-division college courses offered by
California colleges.
 A crucial component of the California legislation is
that the textbooks developed will be made available
under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC
BY).
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Poland
 Digital School program adopted April 2012 by Polish
Council of Ministers
 Aims to raise ICT competencies in Polish schools
 43 million PLN (Polish zloty) has been assigned for the
creation of digital CC BY licensed (or compatible)
textbooks for grades 4-6
 See http://creativecommons.pl/2012/04/digitalschool-program-with-open-textbooks-approved-bypolish-government/.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Adapt project: teaching
adaptations
 2012 pilot project - Bridging the Gap: teaching adaptations across
the disciplines and sharing content for curriculum renewal.
 led by the University of Tasmania, with support from the
Australian Government’s Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT)
 aims to ‘enhance the teaching of adaptations (the study of the
adaptation of an original novel, play, film, poem, video game or
other form of narrative to a different medium) in an Australian
context through the creation of a community of practice of
scholars’.
 will develop a repository of OER relevant to learning and
teaching adaptations.
 See http://www.teaching-learning.utas.edu.au/designing/open-
educational-resources/open-education-resources.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Open Book Project
 An initiative of the U.S. Department of State, the Arab
League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization
 Initiative will:
 Support the creation of Arabic-language Open Educational
Resources (OER) and the translation of existing OER into
Arabic.
 Disseminate the resources free of charge through project
partners and their platforms.
 Offer training and support to governments, educators, and
students to put existing OER to use and develop their own.
 Raise awareness of the potential of OER and promote uptake
of online learning materials.
Open Access to research
 Open Access movement began in 1990s with concerns
about access to research data (eg human genome
project) and scholarly articles published in journals
 Growing dissatisfaction of research community about
traditional business models operating in the digital
environment:
 research conducted with public funds
 articles written and peer-reviewed by scientists and
academics for free
 typically, copyright was assigned entirely to the
publisher
 academics and public charged high fees by publishers
for access to articles
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002)


The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without
expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles,
but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to
alert colleagues to important research findings.
There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By "open access“ we
mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to:
 read
 download
 copy
 distribute
 print
 search, or
 link to the full texts of these articles
 crawl them for indexing
 pass them as data to software or
 use them for any other lawful purpose,
without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from
gaining access to the internet itself.

The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in
this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the
right to be properly acknowledged and cited. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Open Access publishing: the Green and
Gold roads
 Green OA
 Authors retain rights to their work
 make their articles (usually in the form of “accepted manuscripts”)
available through institutional repositories or personal websites –
check OAK List for publisher’s policy on this:
http://www.oaklist.qut.edu.au/


QUT ePrints – eg “Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons”
(2007), Sydney University Press and QUT ePrints http://eprints.qut.edu.au/6677/ - licensed under CC BY NC ND 2.5 Licence - >
8,000 downloads, ranks 15th in QUT ePrints
QUT Law and Justice Journal/QUT Law Review (from 2013): licensed under CC BY
– see https://ljj.law.qut.edu.au/
 Gold OA
 OA that is provided by a publisher, i.e. the article is published
immediately under OA conditions by the journal publisher.
 may be funded in different ways - certain publishers may require the
payment of a fee by the author to make the work available under OA.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Gold OA consistent with CC
 PloS One (OA journal, reportedly the world’s largest scholarly journal
by volume)
 Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organisation ‘dedicated
to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available
public resource’.
 PloS applies CC BY licence to all works it publishes
 Research monographs published by Bloomsbury Academic
(commercial publisher Bloomsbury Publishing’s academic branch)
 Content made available online under a CC BY-NC licence (in addition to
publishing in print and e-book format and offering print-on-demand
copies).
 Frances Pinter, Publisher of Bloomsbury Academic explains:

‘[o]ur business model is simple. We may lose some print sales because of free
access, but we will gain other sales because more people will want the print edition’.

Jane Park, ‘An Interview with Frances Pinter of Bloomsbury Academic’, CC News, 20
October 2008, available at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/10100.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
ANU’s IP Policy
(1 July 2010) http://policies.anu.edu.au/policies/intellectual_property/policy
Part 4 - Section 14. "Open Content" Licensing by
[Staff] Member
14.1 …. A [Staff ] Member who Creates copyright matter which
is owned by the University is granted a perpetual,
irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive licence in respect
of the copyright to grant licences to third parties over the
copyright matter:
(a)
being an open content licence of the form
maintained by the Creative Commons Corporation; or
(b)
being an open source licence in respect of Software,
of the form maintained by the Open Software Initiative or
the Free Software Foundation; or
(c)
in any other form of open content licensing
determined from time to time in writing by the Vice
Chancellor.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
QUT’s IP Policy: Scholarly works
(22 June 2011) http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/D/D_03_01.jsp
3.1.5 Ownership of copyright
 In accordance with general law principles noted in section 3.1.4
above, QUT as an employer is the owner of copyright where
the work is created by staff members in the course of their
employment. QUT’s ownership of copyright applies to both
academic and professional staff.
Assignment of scholarly works
 Provided that QUT does not have contractual obligations to a
third party which would prevent QUT effecting such an
assignment, QUT assigns the right to publish scholarly
works to the creator(s) of that work. The assignment is
subject to a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free,
non-exclusive licence in favour of QUT to allow QUT to use
that work for teaching, research and commercialisation purposes
and to reproduce and communicate that work online for
non-commercial purposes via QUT's open access digital
repository.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
National Health and Medical Research
Council (NHMRC) policy on access to
research publications and data
 Revised policy, effective 1 July 2012, mandates that:
 any publications arising from an NHMRC supported
research project must be deposited into an open
access institutional repository within a twelve
month period from the date of publication.

http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/media/notices/2012/revisedpolicy-dissemination-research-findings
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Joint Statement on Data Sharing of
Public Health Research
 NHMRC is a signatory to the Joint Statement on Data
Sharing of Public Health Research issued by the Wellcome
Trust
 Joint Statement expresses a commitment to the timely and
responsible sharing of public health data:
 Much of the data collection that could improve public health
research is expensive and time-consuming. As public and
charitable funders of this research, we believe that making
research data sets available to investigators beyond the
original research team in a timely and responsible
manner, subject to appropriate safeguards, will generate
three key benefits:



faster progress in improving health
better value for money
higher quality science.
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Australian Research Council (ARC)
Open Access policy
 Effective 1 January 2013
 Any publications arising from an ARC supported
research project must be deposited into an open access
institutional repository within a twelve (12) month
period from the date of publication
 Requirement subject to legal or contractual obligations
(i.e. restrictive publishing contracts which prohibit/do
not allow for open access)
 http://www.arc.gov.au/applicants/open_access.htm
CC & Government Guide
CC & Government Guide: Using Creative
Commons 3.0 Australia Licences on Government
Copyright Materials
Anne Fitzgerald, Neale Hooper & Cheryl Foong (2011)
<http://eprints.qut.edu.au/38364/>
<http://creativecommons.org.au/sectors/governme
nt>
Guides for data managers and academic authors also
available at
<http://www.aupsi.org/publications/guides.jsp>
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald..
Townsville Tripping by Rob and Stephanie Levy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robandstephanielevy/1557428475/
Thank you
 Professor Anne Fitzgerald
 QUT Law School
 CC Australia
 Publications
(http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Fitzgerald,_Anne.
html)
 Access to Public Sector Information
(http://www.aupsi.org)
 Creative Commons Australia
(http://creativecommons.org.au/)
© 2012 Anne Fitzgerald. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia.