Creative Commons and The Open University
by Alma Hales and Andy Lane
It is five years since The Open University seriously investigated whether it should join the then small but growing band of universities making some of their educational content openly and freely available to all around the world. MIT  and a few other US institutions had already done so to great fanfare and acclaim. It is four years since we also had to decide which licence to adopt for this major venture, which has since become the set of websites called OpenLearn. 
This was not the beginning of The Open University’s involvement with freely accessible educational content or with open licences (nor with dealing with Intellectual Property issues around educational resources). For 35 years (at that time) we had been working with the BBC on free to air broadcasts that latterly could be captured by video recorders. We had also been working for eight years with the BBC on a related website (open2.net) that had additional freely accessible content and information for listeners and viewers of these programmes. But all this material was still under copyright, free to be accessed (or recorded) for personal use but not for other uses unless prior permission was sought. In 2005 a group known as the Creative Archive was set up by the BBC, bfi (British Film Institute), Channel 4 and The Open University to make certain archive content available for the public to use under the terms of the Creative Archive Licence (CAL). This licence has five rules: no commercial use; share alike; give credit; no endorsement; UK only. This pilot effectively finished in 2006 as the partners each followed their own strategy. 
So this brings us back to the decision about the licence to use for OpenLearn. We chose a Creative Commons licence as the licensing mechanism that best allows us to deliver the outcomes of the OpenLearn initiative: wide acceptance worldwide (i.e. not restricted to the UK); easily understandable terms (i.e. we did not have to go to great lengths writing them ourselves as with the Creative Archive Licence); a degree of protection against unauthorised commercial exploitation of resources that we intended to deliver freely to the global educational community (i.e. we have seen commercial misuse of our fully copyrighted content in the past and understand how to deal with it) and that were being used by most of the other institutions involved with OpenCourseWare and Open Educational Resources around the world. We were also much more concerned with releasing content than with developing the perfect licence. Having seen too many projects stall while waiting for a perfect solution, we took the approach of adopting a licence and then measuring its impact as we got on with the initiative. (In fact, we still are doing so across the board and have openly published a research report on our first two years, which is available from Open Research Online – our open access publishing site for research publications.) 
Our choice of a Creative Commons licence has generated a great deal of debate within both commercial rights industries and within education. Reaction has ranged from the comment of one legal advisor, ‘Anyone who chooses to use a Creative Commons licence either doesn’t understand what they are doing, or doesn’t care’ to that of many proponents of OER who see our choice of a non-commercial licence as unnecessarily restrictive. 
So far, the Attribution – NonCommercial – ShareAlike licence has delivered everything we hoped for. There have been over 10 million visits by over 8 million people to OpenLearn in a little over three years. Tens of thousands of downloads of our content occur every month. The content is being used as is or adapted and translated for local use with many more learners by many different organisations worldwide. We have many very happy users and very few problems over misuse. So much in fact that the use of Creative Commons licences by The Open University for a wider range of content is increasing as we explore and evaluate the impact of all our work in open innovation around technologies and content.
Last, but not least, because we have had a professional and dedicated Rights Team for many years at The Open University we have been debating and sharing ideas and evidence about licensing with media companies and educational publishers as well as other universities, actively working with them to mutually publish some of their material under a Creative Commons licence. Few turn away completely (we have successfully cleared over 97 per cent of all third party content present in the original course materials) and most, like us, are beginning to accept that there can be value created from open publishing beyond what it might be separately sold for – although we are yet to see how open content may make more fundamental changes to our business models. 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ by-sa/ 2.0/ uk/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.