Licensing guide
This Help section looks at a range of issues around licensing.
Why do I need to attach a licence to my resource?
All learning and teaching resources which are shared via Jorum need to carry a Creative Commons (CC) licence. Licensing helps to protect your rights when you share a resource, and informs users about what they can and can’t do with a resource that they find in Jorum.
What licences are available in Jorum?
Jorum currently offers depositors the option to choose from the Creative Commons V2.0 UK suite of licences when depositing learning and teaching resources in Jorum.
What are Creative Commons Licences?
Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organisation which has developed a suite of online licences, which permit varying degrees of copying and reuse of content, and can be embedded into a range of resources. CC licences can be used to license resources known as Open Educational Resources (OER). Anyone can download, reuse and repurpose OER within the terms and conditions of use in the resource’s CC licence.
These licences can be used by anyone to communicate how their work can be used, shared and repurposed. You can use CC licences to provide access to resources, as long as you own the rights to the resources, or have specific permission from the rights holder to do so. With a CC licence, you keep your copyright but allow others to copy and distribute your work, provided they attribute your work and adhere to the conditions you specify in the licence.
There are six main licences, ranging from the most accommodating licence type (“attribution” only) to a more restrictive licence type such as “Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives”. The Creative Commons website contains further information on the licence framework employed for JorumOpen, as well as a range of FAQs.
What Creative Commons (CC) licence should I use?
The licence you choose will depend on a number of factors, which you will need to explore locally. The Jorum team cannot provide legal advice, but JISC Legal provides legal guidance for ICT use in education and research.
A wide range of information is available on licensing, including the OER IPR Support Project; and the Creative Commons website also contains information on selecting the right CC licence for your work.
How is Jorum’s licensing regime changing?
From August 2011, Jorum users will be able to find and share Open Educational Resources (OER) in Jorum, which are licensed under Creative Commons (CC) licences. Jorum is moving forward with a focus on OER, to simplify Jorum and to help make its offering to the educational community clearer.
What has happened to the Jorum EducationUK and Institutional Licences?
A relatively small number of resources were previously made available in Jorum under more restrictive licences, namely the Jorum EducationUK and Institutional Licences.
The Jorum EducationUK licence was designed for those who wished to restrict access to their resources to UK Education only. The Jorum Institutional licence additionally required an institutional subscription; this licence expired at the end of July 2011. Jorum no longer supports these licences, in our move and vision to become a fully open national repository of learning and teaching resources. We are working on relicensing the resources previously deposited under the Jorum EducationUK and Institutional licences, and further information is available in [this blog post](http://jorumnews.blogspot.com/2011/06/re-licensing-jorums-resources-to-be.html). Please contact support@jorum.ac.uk if you have any questions.
Contributors who wish to retain either the Jorum Institutional or the Jorum EducationUK licence will be able to see and maintain their resources; we are dedicated to protecting contributors’ intellectual property, and these resources will continue to be stored and archived within Jorum for as long as the contributor wishes. However, as of 1st August 2011, resources which carry a non-CC licence will not be searchable, viewable or accessible by other users. Contributors also need to migrate their accounts in order to view their resources after this date; to do so, please contact support@jorum.ac.uk.
If you do have requirements for Jorum to host content under a more restrictive licence, please contact support@jorum.ac.uk for more information.
How can I relicense my resources?
The Jorum team is contacting depositors of resources licensed under the JorumEducationUK or Institutional licences to invite them to relicense their resource(s) under a Creative Commons licence where possible.
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