Back to Basics: understanding the fundamentals of Open Access
In the lead up to this year’s International Open Access Week (20–26 October), Deakin Library is publishing a series of articles that explore this year’s OA Week theme: “Who Owns Our Knowledge?”. In this first post, our guest writer Lisa Grbin, Open Education Librarian, takes us back to the basics and asks how we can make knowledge open.
Deakin Library will be hosting an event during Open Access Week at 10am on Thursday, 23 October. We will be discussing the OA Week theme with a selection of panellists from the open publishing community. Register now.
How do you ‘own’ knowledge?
Can you ‘own’ knowledge? The answer is yes… and no.
In Australia, if you author or produce a work in tangible form, you automatically get some free protections for this work (barring a few exceptions). However, these protections do not extend to ideas and intangible forms.
These protections are called copyright, and they are very, very old – written and put in place well before the Internet came to be. However, the Internet presented a massive turning point in the way information and knowledge could be shared (and how easily these things could be shared), from print and place-based mediums to electronic and on-demand.
Copyright and knowledge ownership also needed to evolve. With resources online being copied, shared, reconstructed, appearing and disappearing so rapidly we don’t always know where information comes from and who owns the knowledge we consume.
To this day, there is some friction between views (and arguments) for copyright:
- Is copyright a safety net to help creators contain and benefit from their work? or
- Is copyright a guardrail preventing information use more widely and stunting progress?
It’s safe to say, things are a little messy.
How knowledge is created and shared: Open-ing up knowledge
What if creators and authors of knowledge wanted their creations to be free so more people can read, share and possibly use their work for education, teaching, learning and research towards the greater good? Specifically, without their use having to fit in with current copyright exceptions and allowances (e.g. copyrighted materials can already be used for private study, teaching, criticism or review, parody or satire, or reporting the news). Enter Creative Commons licensing in the early 2000s. These licenses work with copyright to give authors and creators the power, choice, and flexibility to set up-front permissions for their work, letting everyone know how open their work is and how it can be used.
Where has it come from: balancing freedom and control in sharing
So, what do the different CC licenses allow? How do they relate to tracing where knowledge has come from when it is shared?
There are six Creative Commons (CC) licenses.
“Creative commons license spectrum” by Shaddim is licensed under CC BY 4.0
The six licences are aligned on a spectrum, from most open (CC BY) to least open (CC BY-NC-ND). The spectrum is bracketed by the public domain tools (preceding CC BY) and ‘all rights reserved’ (proceeding CC BY-NC-ND). The four different licence conditions and their combinations (kind of like Lego blocks), determine their positioning on this scale and the ‘openness’ classification of the works they apply to.
There are CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, CC BY-ND and CC BY-NC-ND.
You will notice that all have the ‘CC BY’ element, which means, at the very least, use of all CC licensed work requires the author or creator to be acknowledged (attributed) when their works are used by others. This is where and how we can trace where knowledge has come from.
Another way to look at the spectrum is that CC licences and their degree of freedom align with other classifications: Open Access (OA) and Open Education Resources (OER). Typically, we distinguish these as:
- OA – free to read, which encompasses the entire spectrum (but sometimes not ‘all rights reserved’).
- OER – free to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute, which encompasses only part of the spectrum.
It’s important to note that, sometimes, ‘all rights reserved’ content can be made ‘free to read’ or openly accessible so that the work itself does not require subscription or payment to view.
See what we did there? This diagram is actually CC licensed (and an OER itself) – the wording under the image is called an attribution, so we can see where it has come from and how the CC licence allows us to use it. Attributions are different from citations, and if you want to learn more about what the CC licences are, check out the Understanding OER Licences Webpage.
Whose voices are recognised and valued?
Applying CC licensing is a choice left to the copyright holders. The licence acts like an open invitation that removes more barriers that may make it harder for others to use, build on, transform, value-add and contribute their collective knowledge to the work.
Confused? Let’s think about this in a different way. Imagine a book lives on the top shelf of a very old library, and you want to use it. It’s there, you can get to it, but if you want to read and share what you learn with someone else, you’re going to need a ladder or be one of the less than 10% that is tall enough to read it. If the book is on the bottom shelf, anyone and everyone can access and use it. Anyone may then use the materials to derive new findings, combine them with other sources to transform, approach new areas of enquiry or present the information in a completely different way, e.g. via translations, visualisations, etc.
In-practice examples at Deakin
- Enabling and optimising recovery from COVID-19 is a living OER produced by Deakin academics. An invaluable resource providing health professionals and others with the knowledge, skills and advice to work with people recovering from COVID-19 infection or experiencing Long COVID. The work is innovative in an area that is still emerging and remains variably understood. The licensing is open, allowing use and contributions from external partners, including experts from the Australian Physiotherapy Association.
- Historical thinking for senior secondary students is a collection of student-authored assessments from the Master of Teaching (Secondary). The OER includes 43 student-authored chapters, each aligning with the Australian curriculum. By getting involved in this project, students had the opportunity to engage in active learning, gain experience in different technologies and obligations (e.g. copyright, licensing and accessibility for open creation and publishing), build professional networks, and contribute to their professional portfolio. The CC-licensed chapters are freely usable in practice by institutions, groups or individuals, including those with limited financial resources, like developing countries, contributing to real-world outcomes in education.
Food for thought
As a last thought, before you hear from us again next week, we want to ask you: Where does the knowledge you use come from? Are there any barriers that prevent you from using resources the way you want? How could you expand your knowledge further?
Learn more about OA and join us for an online event on Thursday, 23 October at 10am, where we will be discussing this year’s International Open Access Week theme with panellists from the open publishing community. Register now.