Requesting permissions to use extracts

[Sam Lee Pan]

Hi there,

Here two questions regarding permissions:

1. Do you use template emails for requesting permissions to use material from organisations / individuals? And if so, are you willing to share these with the group? We have been trying to devise these as we go along, but only have a few and would like to check if there is a set template or format.
2. Have you dealt with permissions for extracts (figures, tables)  from Journals before? 
   

• I have emailed the copyright centre but they have a generic response which said that you should pay registration and royalty fees.  Another journal replied with a default 10 week response time to process the request.
  
• I am also contacting the authors separately,  one author kindly gave us permission and a copy of a preprint version. Another author gave us permission but did not send a preprint version, so seems that we are still reliant on the journal coming back to us....
  
• I heard another option would be to create our own graphic from the image (it would represent the same information but be styled and formatted by us).  Is this fine, and do we need to obtain permission from the journal for this? Besides image extracts there are also tables extracted from journal articles.  These contain long lists and may be more difficult to reproduce in our own format (data fidelity may be lost with retyping)

Thanks,
Sam

Health Open Education Resources (OER) project administrator
Education Development Unit (EDU), Health Sciences, UCT
email: heal...@uct.ac.za, sam.l...@uct.ac.za | tel: 021 406 6827, 084 477 6089

More information on: Open Education Resources | Creative Commons licensing

Finding OER content: OER Africa | UCT Open Content

[Kathleen (U-M)]

Hi Sam,

These are great questions. I encourage others to weigh in on this topic too. My initial thoughts:

At U-M, we have two permission forms that we use for students, staff, faculty, and guest speakers, essentially all members of the U-M community. Our forms are available at: https://open.umich.edu/wiki/ > gray dScribe section > Essential Forms and Resources > License (direct links are below).

1) We have a form for selecting a Creative Commons license, so that we have a record of the content creators license selection: https://open.umich.edu/wiki/images/b/b2/U-M_Participants_OER_Permission-General.pdf
2) We have a consent form for recording. This is mainly used for guest lectures and recording regular classes. https://open.umich.edu/wiki/images/5/51/PermissonToRecord.pdf

We have PDF versions and then HTML versions that people with a U-M login can access. We have the login restriction so that we can confirm identity. I would be glad to share the source code if you are interested. We are also exploring integrating the permission forms into the next phase of development for our OERbit software platform (http://open.umich.edu/oerbit). 

If any of the recordings involve patients, last year OER Africa put together a guide on ethical consent for recordings with patients: http://www.oerafrica.org/healthoer/HealthOERHome/HealthResources/tabid/274/mctl/Details/id/38582/Default.aspx

Regarding seeking permission for materials, we only go that route if we believe that we will receive a positive, timely response. In most cases, that limits us to people that the dScribes or Open.Michigan staff personally know or creators who are within U-M. We don't recommend that our dScribes seek permission from publishers or non-U-M authors because you can easily spend months waiting to hear back and the publishers may still insist on licensing fees. For that reason, we tend to replace or remove and annotate third party copyright-restricted content. When we remove and annotate, we try to provide a bibliographic citation or link so that people can find the original if they desire.

Regarding your second question about figures and tables, this one has a more complicated answer, which can vary by country. Copyright applies to tangible works of creative expression. It applies to things that are created, not things that are scientifically discovered, like facts, mathematical formulas, or obvious arrangement (e.g. chronological or alphabetical) of facts, data, names, etc. This later group (facts, etc) are ineligible for copyright. Some countries (e.g. England) have strong data protection laws around databases that make that even more complicated though. Perhaps someone from the OER team at the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT will be able to tell you more about South African copyright law and the line for ineligibility for copyright based on South African case law. (The African Copyright and Access to Knowledge Project put together a comprehensive report on South Africa a couple years ago: http://www.aca2k.org/)

Legally, you may be justified in taking a simple chart of facts from a journal article and using it for commentary in OER or another educational resource. A lower risk option, though, would be the third option that you suggested, which would be for you or the dScribe to create a new table with the same facts (or at least the relevant ones). The underlying As you mentioned, when pursuing this route, it's important to double check that the data is consistent in the new chart.

I hope that's helpful!

-Kathleen