What are some examples of successfully obtaining permission?

Example 1: Obtaining permission to redistribute existing free materials

In our agriculture OER work for AgShare, we discovered that there are very few OER course materials in the agricultural sciences at the tertiary level. We therefore focused our efforts on identifying freely available reading materials that are available online. Because these are reading resources for students and lecturers, our focus was not necessarily on finding resources for adaptation.

We found the following kinds of materials:

1. Journal articles in Open Access journals, some of which carry Creative Commons licences.
2. A handful of case studies and other reference materials with Creative Commons licensing or other licences that allow for redistribution without requesting permission.
3. The vast majority of resources, however, are produced by international, governmental or nongovernmental organizations and are freely available, but are also copyrighted. We are therefore requesting explicit permission to use and distribute, with attribution, for scholarly purposes. In one instance, the publisher told us that it was their implicit intention to allow their resources to be redistributed without permission – however, the copyright statement on the publisher’s website does not make this explicit.

We believe that in most instances, if a resource is available online free of charge, the copyright holder will be willing to allow others to use and distribute the work – with attribution, and probably only for scholarly purposes and without modification.

Example 2: Obtaining a licence for existing, proprietary, commercial works

One of OER Africa’s content focus areas is teacher education and development. Saide authored a Teacher Education Series, which was published from 1998 to 2002 with Oxford University Press. Saide owned the copyright for the learning guides, readers and video/audio resources that make up the modules in this series. As most of these resources are now out of print and the publishing rights for most of the modules in the series have reverted to Saide, Saide wanted to make the series – including the Saide-authored content and some third-party readings – digitally available on the OER Africa website under a Creative Commons licence.

In order to do this, permission needed to be sought with regard to the third-party readings. Letters were sent to the copyright holders – in this case, the publishers – who were informed of our desire to post the readings online and were requested to select a Creative Commons licence.

Permission was granted for many of the readings, but not all, and some copyright holders either refused permission or granted permission under certain restrictions.

Saide reviewed the status for each module, and found that permission was granted for a sufficient number of key readings for it to be useful for those readings to be made available on the website. A full reference list for all of the readings was provided so that users could source the readings (where permission was not granted) independently or apply for copyright permission themselves should they need to – Saide offered to supply print copies to those users wishing to do so.