OERs, Licensing, and Are We There Yet?
2 min read
From some comments I made on Tom Hoffman's blog, in response to the Capetown Declaration -- Stephen Downes also has a great take on this.
As I see it, the thing to be avoided is:
A person or a community creates a resource that is freely available, and can be easily moved from one site to another. Some other entity comes along, uses that resource as a base for their work, distributes that resource, charges money for access to that resource, yet does not the new source material freely available.
That entity has effectively taken something that was freely available and commodified it into something that is no longer freely available.
In general terms, the point of an OER is to create a tool that is freely available. As that tool is improved, the improved version will also remain freely available.
From reading the Capetown Declaration, it is not difficult to imagine a situation where the major publishers co-opt chunks of allegedly "open content" and unleash their "experts" on it, and then generate reams of marketing material describing how they are embracing the democratization of knowledge. And, of course, this "new" work built on top of OERs would not be freely available.
It's pretty obvious that the barriers to more widespread adoption of OERs are financial, and not technical. Creating, sharing, and republishing content is easy. Any chump with a few hours of spare time can cobble something together. And textbook publishers are very nervous, as they should be. Given that the CC Non-Commercial Share-Alike License exists, and has a mechanism to prevent removing OERs from the realm of free access, why not use it?
The only answer that readily springs to mind is that it doesn't play well with business plans that are predicated on selling content. The thing I love about the non-commercial license is that it aligns perfectly with a business plan predicated on selling services that add value to content. In other words, you actually need to *know something* about what you sell.
