Greetings Open Education Colleagues:

 

We need your help.

 

In October, we shared the news that the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is considering requiring an open license on the products of their competitive grants. ED is now accepting comments on this proposed open licensing policy.

 

Based on the comments sent to ED thus far, it is both critically important to show OER community (all of us) support for this proposed open licensing policy, and also to draw upon the incredible wealth of on-the-ground knowledge that exists among the global OER community.

 

There’s a FAQ for you posted here. 

 

Here are sample comments from: Creative Commons (+ blog post), SPARC and EFF… feel free to reuse these comments to create and submit your comments.

 

We encourage all OER organizations and individual open education leaders to consider responding to the Department’s call for public comments.

 

The deadline is December 18th.

 

Additional details:

 

Suggested talking points on general issues:

• Explain why the open licensing policy will benefit your country, education institutions, teachers and students.
• Support language in § 3474.20(a) defining the terms of the open license to be used for works covered by the policy. 
• Encourage the Department select the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) as the license grantees should use to implement the policy. 
• Encourage the Department to broaden the policy from direct competitive grant funds to be the default for ALL Department grant funds. 
• Encourage the Department to reconsider the proposed exemption for peer-reviewed research articles arising from grants funded by the Institute for Education Sciences.
  

Questions posed by the Department for practical information:

• Should the Department require that copyrightable works be openly licensed prior to the end of the grant period as opposed to after the grant period is over? If yes, what impact would this have on the quality of the final product?
• Should the Department include a requirement that grantees distribute copyrightable works created under a direct competitive grant program? If yes, what suggestions do you have on how the Department should implement such a requirement?
• What further activities would increase public knowledge about the materials and resources that are created using the Department's grant funds and broaden their dissemination?
• What technical assistance should the Department provide to grantees to promote broad dissemination of their grant-funded intellectual property?
• What experiences do you have implementing requirements of open licensing policy with other Federal agencies? Please share your experiences with these different approaches, including lessons learned and recommendations that might be related to this document.

Again the deadline for comments is December 18th, and more information on submitting comments is here.

 

If you have any questions please ask.

 

Most gratefully!

 

Cable

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Cable Green, PhD
Director of Global Learning
Creative Commons
@cgreen
retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute

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