Martin, Hello. I agree. I think that most of us want to enhance access and I suppose we all can do our parts individually. That is, if we individually have copyright to the work we create, we can license it and distribute it ways that meet our needs and help lower barriers so everybody has the chance to learn, as your rightfully iterate. It becomes more of a challenge when you are trying to create an environment in which a lot of productive capacity is being leveraged.
For example, those of us who manage organizations that produce a lot of digital resources used in online or hybrid courses are frequently managing and are trying to transform legacy systems in our institutions to reduce barriers to opening educational resources. Cole (see comment above) identified the behavioral manifestation of some cultural issues. Three artifacts that we have to work with that raise and lower barriers to leveraging productive capacity include:
- Work Flows: Are the work flows in the organization conducive to making content open and free? This includes content management.
- Rights Waivers: Does the work unit responsible for "fixing content to a digital storage devise" require that the author/creator waive or transfer their copyright to the university? If so, do the terms of the waiver provide the opportunity to open content?
- University Licensing: Does the university of a policy around licensing “open” and libre content? If so, is it standard (one of the Creative Content Licenses, the newly evolving “Libre” license, etc.) or an internal license?
There are a lot of other issues, some of which have been reference in previous posts, but the three identified above frequently reflect the organization's cultural commitments as artifacts whose impact can be significant.
Cheers, Ken
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