Effective open licensing policy and
practice for Australian universities

Online help with open licensing decisions

  • 0
  • June 5, 2015

The OEL project team is very interested in interactive or web based information resources that help users to make decisions around open licensing. As part of the OEL project we will be developing an Open Education Licensing toolkit next year. So while we’re gathering data from Australian universities on what they need, we’re also looking at how other people are finding ways to help people make decisions about open licensing.

We’ve been keeping a list of interesting examples of aids that provide information about open licences or help people find licences / content or make open licensing decisions. So we just thought we’d have a look at a few of these we’ve noticed recently:

HowOpenIsIt? http://howopenisit.org/lookup/

The Open Article Gauge helps user to determine what type of licence applies to journals and journal articles. Put in a list of DOIs or PubMedIDs to find out what licence applies and how open they are. Still in beta – but potentially very useful.

Choosing an OSS license doesn’t need to be scary http://choosealicense.com/

This great plain language resource from MIT provides help with choosing an open software licence. It gives a simple explanation of what different OSS licences do and which other software systems use those licences.

P2PU course on how to ‘Get a CC licence and Put it on your website’ https://p2pu.org/en/courses/3/get-a-cc-license-put-it-on-your-website/ Covers some really useful questions such as: Is your work copyrightable? Do you have the rights? Really helpful for those interested in sharing.

And of course there’s always the Creative Commons automated licence chooser https://creativecommons.org/choose/ and CC Australia’s useful Creative Commons flowchart http://creativecommons.org.au/content/licensing-flowchart.pdf

The OEL team is always on the lookout for good examples of open licensing decision resources.