Jorum Blog

Re-Licensing Jorum into the Open: PART 2

Posted by Frank Manista on 7th December 2011

Background

Back at the beginning of August, shortly after transition, we announced that we were taking on the rather difficult prospects of re-licensing much of the content in Jorum which had been uploaded under a non-CC licence. A blog post, entitled "Re-Licensing Jorum's Learning and Teaching Resources into the Open" which outlined the complexity and headaches of doing so, was posted on 2 August 2011. In it, we talked about our discussions with JISC Legal, as well as the Intellectual Property people at the University of Manchester, all in the effort to show due diligence. Included in that post, we mentioned the processes we were using to contact the individuals with those resources to get written permission to convert to a CC licence, along with the barriers we were running into.

The Work to Date

We worked long and hard for the past 5 months, attempting to make contact with individuals, some of whom had moved from their institutions and provided no forwarding email address. Some we did find no longer had any affiliation with the projects which produced their resources, and so we went through an equally complex series of negotiations, attempting to find people who would be willing to take on responsibility, and then migrating those resources over to new accounts. All the while, Jorum was also going through its transition to Mimas, as well as working to update the technical side of things -- that curious stuff, darkly hidden, "beneathe the hood" of the database and website. In addition, by virtue of the transition, the team was much smaller than it had been when it was shared by Mimas and EDINA, and currently has only 10 staff, including its two new technical people, and not all of us are full-time for Jorum. In other words, there was a lot to do and not a lot of resource to do it.

The Completion

All that said, we are pleased to announce that the major part of the work of converting those licences has now been completed and under-schedule to boot! As we mentioned back in August, those resources which carried a non-CC licence, such as the EducationUK or the Jorum Institutional licence, were withdrawn and hidden from public use. Since then, Yogesh Patel from the Jorum Technical Team, alongside Hedtek and Ennovation, developed and tested a "licence flipper" and with a few exceptions, nearly 1200 resources have been re-instated to the repository, carrying the CC-BY-NC-SA licence. In our "Featured Resources" section on the homepage, you can view the first "Featured Collection", which are five recently re-released items, all developed by Kate Pearce: www.jorum.ac.uk.

In the end, it was a great deal of work, both for those in the Jorum team and for others within Mimas, whom were tapped to give their help and expertise to make this a success, including Anne Reed and Claire Evans. Jason Miles-Campbell from JISC legal was invaluable in this effort, as was Jennifer Kilner, Contracts Officer from the U of M's Research Office; we also made good contacts with Iram Kiani from the Office of General Council and Geof Wolfenden from the University's Intellectual Property division, and feel that the work done not only shows a high level of effort but the expected due diligence to finally set this task to rest.

And Now What?

And now, we get back to putting more time and attention into moving forward. Jorum has much to do with getting its API up and running, and updating DSpace (blog posts to follow soon!); we are working with our proposed Institutional and Subject Pilots, as well as continuing to support resources from individuals, including the new UKOER Phase-3 Projects; we are putting together our new user groups, with invitations soon to be sent out for an initial Elluminate-style meeting; and our new Steering Group has had its first meeting and has been advising us already on various fronts. We like to think we have our collective fingers on the pulse of something interesting and important, yet we remain somewhat cautious that we don't pinch the artery. We are here to support and to encourage innovative and interesting use and re-use of learning and teaching, and encourage everyone to be in touch and work with us.