In October wewrotethat the U.S. Department of Education (ED) isconsideringan open licensing requirement for direct competitive grant programs. If adopted, educational resources created with ED grant funds will be openly licensed for the public to freely use, share, and build upon.
The Department of Education has been running a comment period in which interested parties can provide feedback on the proposed policy. Creative Commons has drafted aresponse, which discusses the open licensing policy and other questions proposed by ED. You too can share your thoughts with ED–here’s aguideabout how to do it.The deadline is December 18.Submit your comments now!
We think the adoption of an open licensing requirement is useful because it clarifies the rights of the public in how we may all access, use, and adapt ED-funded resources.
The license must be worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable, and must grant the public permission to access, reproduce, publicly perform, publicly display, adapt, distribute, and otherwise use, for any purposes, copyrightable intellectual property created with direct competitive grant funds, provided that the licensee gives attribution to the designated authors of the intellectual property.
We think ED should include a specific mention that the open license definition they provide most closely aligns with the permissions and conditions of theCreative Commons Attribution International 4.0 license(CC BY). This way, it will be clear to grantees which open license ED requires them to use.
It’s good to see the Department of Education proposing a similar rule that the Department of Laborintroduced几年前他们的社区大学和职业培训资助项目。这20亿美元的拨款要求由劳工部拨款资金创建的教育资源必须在CC BY授权下获得许可。通过这样做，劳工部确保了用其拨款资金创建的资源可以很容易地被公众发现，并合法地重用和修改。
Update (January, 7, 2016)
- Creative Commons submitted responseto Department of Education open licensing policy.
- OER coalition response由26个联盟组织签署。
- A total of147(134 non-duplicate) public comments were submitted, most of which show overall support for the policy.
