0.4 Open textbook adoption  (Page 5/5)

Copyright

Although documents, pictures, audio and other information are all easy to copy from the Internet, it is your responsibility to understand and respect the laws that protect the author(s) of electronic information. The copyright laws that govern information in all formats are complex. It is impossible to reduce them to a few simple rules. We encourage you to visit the pages listed here. They have been prepared by legal and other experts on the subject of copyright and can help you learn to decide for yourself whether it is appropriate to use electronic information sources in your work.A basic understanding of copyright, fair use, the TEACH Act, and intellectual property is necessary before using and developing OER in order to minimize the risk of violating the law. 

Did you know that the copyright notice © is no longer required for works published after March 1989?  This means that the absence of a copyright notice does not necessarily mean the work is within the public domain. If you are unfamiliar with copyright issues, you are encouraged to visit one or more of the many online tutorials exist which address these topics.

Watch this video clip that addresses the challenges faced by faculty when distributing copyrighted material from various sources: The Case of Dr. No .

Many basic tutorials about copyright are available:

• Trademark and Other Intellectual Property Resource Guide
• The Copyright Crash Course , University of Texas at Austin
• VA Tech Copyright Info
• What You Need to Know About Copyright
• License Your Work - Creative Commons

Example

Health Course Textbook

The Health Course open textbook alternative content available from MedlinePlus complies with Section 508 accessibility and is available for use under the Copyright Information  stated on their website.

Photographs, illustrations, and multimedia selected from the Public Health Image Library (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) generally free for use without copyright restrictions:

• Most of the images in the collection are in the public domain and are thus free of any copyright restrictions. If you look directly beneath the image you will see a fair use statement that tells you if the image is public domain or copyright protected.
• Permission is not required for public domain images, but we do ask that you credit the original institution and contributor, when known, whenever the image is used in any publicly distributed media.

Step five

Task

Get necessary approvals and disseminate your open textbook for student use in your course. 

Approvals

Get approval from your academic department to use the open textbook in your course. Get your open text on the approved list for articulation purposes with transfer schools, especially if you teach at a community college.

Dissemination

Do-It-Yourself

• Create a PDF of the open content that you have selected.
  • Use Drawloop for creating PDF
  • Use Connexions to create PDF
  • Use OER Commons
  • Convert Gutenberg Text File to PDF  
• Email the PDF to your enrolled students. Or post the PDF to your students' course management system course site. If the PDF is too large to email or post, use a free online file storage or file sharing service
  • Box.net
  • BT Digital Vault
  • Openomy  
• Students can download and print the PDF or simply view the PDF on their computers

Campus Printshop

• Create a PDF of the open content that you have selected.
• Email the PDF to your Printshop per their specifications

Printing Services

• Create a PDF of the open content that you have selected.
• Email the PDF to one of the following Printing Services per their specifications
  • Tour of Lulu
  • SafariU
  • Illumina
  • exlibris

Example

Health Course Textbook

Virgil Bourassa and Fred Mednick from Teachers Without Borders posted a 2006 textbook on child health for their Health Education Course at Connexions. The textbook can be easily downloaded as PDF and printed from the site.

Health educator Stacey Hughes uses Lulu to distribute her 2006 book titled: Health&Social Care Teaching Resources .

This Module was developed by Dr. Judy Baker, Director of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. January 21, 2008.

• To join the Consortium, please contact Dr. Baker at bakerjudy@foothill.edu
• For more information about open textbooks and open educational resources, see the Introduction to Open Educational Resources self-paced tutorial.