Seems a good idea to have one in place. Could we get together and draft a standard template for an OER-MOU with faculty?
I will reach out to faculty who are interested.
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I donāt think we do because we own the copyright in our teaching materials so no such thing is needed (I think?). We can just create our stuff and license it how we wish. or am I not getting the point?
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@clhendricksbc That makes sense. The question also applies to those at universities who are either commissioning the open textbooks from their faculty or who might take different rights.
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Historically, thereās been some confusion here about whether faculty/staff always own the rights to their teaching materials or whether itās considered āwork for hireā. In 2007, our faculty senate passed this resolution about faculty copyright and āauthor addendumsā: http://www.secfac.wisc.edu/senate/2007/0507/1994.pdf Hereās the āaddendumā that was officially endorsed by our faculty senate: https://www.library.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/author_addendum1.pdf. That applies largely to faculty research, I think. In the case of teaching mateirals, in several cases Iāve seen the āBoard of Regents, UW-Madisonā asserted as the copyright holder for material. Iāll ask the libraries here and our legal department for a clarified opinion and whether they have a sample MOU/contract for these kinds of projects.
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@swagstaff Our library also maintains a helpful FAQ for faculty/staff: https://www.library.wisc.edu/help/copyright/managing-your-copyright/personal-copyright-faq/, in case the material here seems like itād be of use to anyone.
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Iām working on a boilerplate MOU/MOA for authors whose projects are funded. Iāll share once I have the draft approved.
Basic pieces:
- Responsible roles/persons
- Agreed timeline for development
- Licensing (CC BY) and depositing in institutional repository
Itās loose, but a start.
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This will be great!
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We donāt. In our country itās enough that our faculty members and instructional developers are contracted as work-for-hire. But if there were a good default contract to use weād consider it as an act of OER solidarity.
That brings up another interesting question. Do they get compensated beyond their normal pay to do this? Or is this a stipulation in their regular contract? That theyāre ceding the rights they develop IP wise while employed in the course of their faculty work to the university.
@lizmays they donāt cede their IP, they are licensing under a CC BY license, but that should be made clear in the MOU I think. ā¦ So in theory whatever IP agreement they have with their institution would remain in force, just that this particular content is licensed CC BY (by whomever āownsā the IP).
@lizmays @hugh Correct, we will be asking them to deposit a CC BY-licensed copy into the repository, but the original authors/creators maintain their copyrights. We just have an open copy to work with after that point.
We may have a policy about all content that lives in our Pressbooks instance (they will need to be openly licensed) like the one for REBUS, in addition to the MOU faculty/staff sign for work they receive support to do.
For those interested in this topic, weāll be hosting a Rebus Office Hours/web call on the subject next week, for details:
https://forum.rebus.community/topic/74/discuss-mous-for-open-textbooks-in-our-next-office-hours
@hugh @lizmays Here is a boilerplate MOA that can serve as a starting point:
Feel free to copy and place in a Google Drive (or other) location where it can be commented/edited by the group. We ended up only needing a letter of agreement for our first go, but this template may be useful to others.
This is wonderful! We will link to it in the reminder weāll send out re. Office Hours next week!
@wmeinke As you suggested, as a followup to our call today, we will be placing this in a Gdoc that can be commented / edited by the group and sending that link by email to Rebus Community members.
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@lizmays Thanks, hope itās useful to some folks.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the Office Hours.
Updates to come soon!
@zoe has put together a quick recap of our office hours session on MOUs. We welcome your feedback on some of the existing MOUs as we work to develop a new master document for review.
A quick update on this topic:
We are now working together with the Open Textbook Network to have a lawyer affiliated with Creative Commons look over our potential draft MOU.
We should have another update on this soon.
