The OpenContent UCT project at the University of Cape Town tries to encourage academics to create resources which can be shared and reused by their colleagues as well as other educators or self-learners.  These resources, shared openly on the internet, can then be discovered, used and remixed by teachers around the world.

In order to make resources openly available we must adhere to issues of copyright.  We encourage academics to source and use works licensed under Creative Commons whenever possible so that we can legally share the resulting materials more widely.  Creative Commons provides an alternative legal framework for specifying conditions for reuse of creative materials.  Creative Commons provides the vehicle for content creators to specify a licence for reuse of their content with “some rights reserved”, thus providing an alternative to the “all rights reserved” model of traditional copyright. 

This video attempts to bring awareness to some of the implications in sourcing materials online without considering the copyright on the material.  If we can transform teachers practice so that they use Creative Commons materials exclusively, we can legally share much more of our teaching and learning content!  

We are pleased to share the news that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town Dr. Max Price has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge.  This marks another milestone in UCT’s move towards open practices in scholarly communication.  Furthermore it represents UCT’s commitment to increasing access to education and knowledge in Africa. 

From the declaration’s preface:

The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access.

We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of the Internet as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge. Obviously, these developments will be able to significantly modify the nature of scientific publishing as well as the existing system of quality assurance.

In signing the declaration, UCT joins a number of other leading institutions around the world committed to supporting open access to research and knowledge produced at the university.  UCT has joined a global community of educators and researchers who recognize the enormous opportunities presented by the internet.  Signing the declaration indicates a commitment to supporting open practices by:

• encouraging our researchers/grant recipients to publish their work according to the principles of the open access paradigm.
• encouraging the holders of cultural heritage to support open access by providing their resources on the Internet.
• developing means and ways to evaluate open access contributions and online-journals in order to maintain the standards of quality assurance and good scientific practice.
• advocating that open access publication be recognized in promotion and tenure evaluation.
• advocating the intrinsic merit of contributions to an open access infrastructure by software tool development, content provision, metadata creation, or the publication of individual articles.

CC on Orange by Yohei Yamashita (CC-BY 2.0)

We still get many questions regarding Creative Commons licenses from academics looking for ways to share their teaching materials.  In fact we run entire workshops going through alternative and open licenses and introducing academics to Creative Commons.  Unfortunately we don’t always get everyone in the room at the same time, and so sharing the open ethos widely is still a challenge.

I have just stumbled upon a wonderful video introduction to Creative Commons from Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand.  The five minute video introduces the need for alternative license, the process of applying the license to your works, and appropriating open content into your own creative works.  It goes on to explain the various license elements, how the various elements can be mixed, and finally explores where one can go to find openly licensed content.  

The video can also be downloaded for sharing in your department from here.  Thumbs up from South Africa to New Zealand!  Will chat about the rugby later… ;) 
 

Yesterday the Mozilla Drumbeat organization launched a new tool to help content users reference openly licensed Creative Commons content.  Referencing openly licensed content has been slightly ambigious in the past with many people adopting their own methods. The OpenAttribute project aims to make referencing of openly licensed content as simple as possible, highly accessible within the browser, and super useful!  

Whenever I use Creative Commons content I always try to include a link back to the webpage where I found the content as well as a link to the Creative Commons license deed online. I have used various open licensing referencing tools in the past, including the Xpert Project Attribution tool which actually embeds the license text and urls into the image - this has been useful for putting images into Powerpoint or some other offline program.  I have also used and blogged about Imagecodr which gives an HTML version of the license with links to the content and the license deed - this has been useful for putting openly licensed content on my blog and other websites.  These tools have been great in helping me get the proper references, but they required that I go visit another site to get the job done. 

Using Open Attribute

What I love about the Open Attribute project is that is a web browser plugin.  So I do not need to navigate elsewhere to extract the code I need to attribute a Creative Commons work.  Once you have installed the plug in (on Firefox, Safari or Chrome) the plugin will automatically sense when you are on a Creative Commons licensed webpage.  

In the image above I am viewing a picture from the World Economic Forum.  The picture is licensed under Creative Commons, so on the right hand site of the URL bar a little CC icon appears.  

When you click on the CC icon a drop down box appears. 

From here you can 'Copy Attribution' as plain text (for documents) and as HTML (for webpages).  You can also click on more information to get a more detailed view of the license panel.  

For this particular image the exported references look like this: 

Plain text reference:
Opening Plenary - World Economic Forum on Africa 2009 /     World Economic Forum (http://www.flickr.com/people/worldeconomicforum/relationship/) / CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)

HTML reference:
<span about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/3613744771/in/set-72157617685533519/" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"><span property="dct:title">Opening Plenary - World Economic Forum on Africa 2009</span> / <a rel="cc:attributionURL" property="cc:attributionName" href="http://www.flickr.com/people/worldeconomicforum/relationship/">    World Economic Forum</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA 2.0</a></span>

This HTML will show up as displayed below if embedded in a webpage: 

Opening Plenary - World Economic Forum on Africa 2009 / World Economic Forum / CC BY-SA 2.0

The Open Attribute tool makes it really simple to extract references from webpages licensed with Creative Commons content.  Great work on the part of the Mozilla Drumbeat team!  This is a real contribution to the Creative Commons movement! There is a lovely summary of the origins of the project on Molly Kleinman's blog.