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 Unit 6: You and your university

Unit 6: You and your university

Introduction

‘CC BY’ was produced by Visual Thinkery for TIDE project, part of the UK-Aid-funded SPHEIR programme (spheir.org.uk), and is licensed CC BY 2.0

The role of Librarians, ICT and Support Staff is quickly developing to support changes in the Myanmar education system or in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In our fast-changing information environment, expertise in open licensing is a crucial asset.

Creative Commons licences are the most popular open licences among open education and open access projects around the world; CC puts the ‘open’ in OER and open access (OA). This module will introduce you to the specifics of using CC licences and CC-licensed content for education and research purposes.

This unit has three sections:

  • 6.1 Open access to scholarship
  • 6.2 Opening up your institution
  • 6.3 What next?

There are also additional resources if you are interested in learning more about any of the topics covered in this unit.

6.1 Open access to scholarship

Photo credit: Open Access at CC designed by Amy Collier, copyright owned by Creative Commons, licensed CC BY

Learning outcomes

By the end of this section of the course you will be able to:

  • define open access
  • explain the benefits of open access to students, researchers and teachers at your institution
  • describe how authors can make their own works open access.

Reflection

How do you support students and educators looking for research materials? Have you ever encountered a paywall while trying to access research articles? How does your institution support the publication and open availability of research?

Introduction

“Open Access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers” (Open Access, Wikipedia)

Open access research contrasts the existing ‘closed’ system for communicating scientific and scholarly research, where research papers are often only available to institutions able to pay for journal access and papers are behind expensive paywalls. This often means that material is inaccessible to many academics around the world or to people not working in education. This can affect how quickly ideas and innovation can develop.

This section will explore open access publishing, which aims to provide free access to scholarship, and offers the potential for universities and colleges to provide up-to-date resources and research to both students and educators at no cost. Conversely, open access journals and repositories also offer the potential for Myanmar universities to showcase their research to a wider international audience.

Let’s take a deeper look at how we can support a university to explore the possibilities of open access.

What is open access?

The Budapest Open Access Initiative defines open access (OA) as follows:

[Free] availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of [research] articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution and the only role for copyright in this domain should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Important components of the OA model include:

  • authors or their institutions keeping their copyright
  • immediate free availability of publications without an embargo period
  • adding a Creative Commons licence to the publication or research output, preferably using the CC BY license.
  • sharing the research data with the article, where possible and where agreed with any participants during the research process

Watch the following video, ‘Open access explained!’ (English language version):

Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Different models of journals

You may have a university journal. Colleagues may publish their conference proceedings. What kind of publishing models do you currently use? Do you publish institutional research under certain conditions, or with a particular licence? If you are involved with publishing institutional research, what process do the papers undergo before publication?

Let’s take a closer look at the difference between ‘closed’ and open access journals. When you submit a paper to a journal for consideration and peer review, what happens next?

‘Closed’ journals

Some of the articles that pass the peer review stage are offered for publication in the journal. The journal will notify the author that their paper has been accepted, and usually require that the author transfer copyright to (or agree to an exclusive publishing contract with) the journal. By accepting these terms, the author has granted to the journal their exclusive rights under copyright. This means that the journal – and not the author – is now the copyright holder, and thus may restrict the terms of access and reuse provided for by the bundle of rights granted to rights holders under the law.

Because journals have become the de facto rights holders to scientific research, they are also in the position to licence access to these materials to university libraries, research institutions, and the public – most of the time for a significant fee. This leads to a cycle where for-profit publishers essentially sell back access to the scientific and scholarly record that academics originally produced.

Even after a publishing embargo expires – usually six to twelve months when publishers retain exclusive publishing rights – the access to the mostly publicly funded scientific research remains limited, with users only permitted to read those articles if they are properly submitted to institutional repositories. In the end, the public is left with suboptimal access to the publicly funded scholarly record, and progress in the scientific enterprise doesn’t reach its maximum potential.

Open access journals

Open Access journals perform peer review and then make the approved papers freely and openly available to the world. Most open access journals allow authors to retain the copyright of their papers, without restrictions. The authors can then grant the publisher non-exclusive publishing rights (or the right of first publishing) to publish the articles. In many countries, the source of funding may stipulate that research outputs are made available to the public, for example on a particular CC licence. This means that researchers retain their copyrights instead of yielding them to for-profit publishers. Alternatively, researchers must search out a ‘gold’ open access journal, which publishes research under liberal open access licences (like CC BY) from the start.

In either case, when their work is accepted, researchers retain some – or all – rights to their research articles, permitting them to publish under open licences, and ensuring that they may deposit their articles in a repository for long-term access and preservation. Subsequent users are granted the legal permissions to access and reuse the research. This type of open access system is better aligned with the original purpose of conducting science and sharing results openly through the scholarly publishing process.

Ultimately, the open access approach is more efficient, equitable, affordable, and collaborative.

Open access options

Open access authors have the opportunity to publish in a few ways; the most common are known as ‘green’ or ‘gold’ open access.

Green OA

This means ​making a version of the manuscript freely available in a repository. This is also known as self-archiving.

An example of green OA is a university research repository. In Myanmar, the Myanmar Education Research and Learning Portal (MERAL) – a project of the Myanmar Rectors’ Committee, National Education Policy Commission, Department of Higher Education, the Ministry of Education with support from EIFL and the National Institute of Informatics, Japan – provides free and open access to research publications (from international and local journals, theses, conference papers, etc.) Another example is The Open University’s Open Research Online (ORO).

Sometimes researchers will make a preprint of their work available: a draft that has not yet undergone peer review or been published in a journal. Preprints are often available on an open license and can also be found in institutional repositories alongside openly licensed published journal articles, dissertations and ‘closed’ journal papers, which are only available to subscribers or following an embargo period.

Gold OA

This means making the final version of the manuscript freely available immediately upon publication by the publisher, typically by publishing in an open access journal and making the article available under an open licence. An example of a gold OA journal publisher is PLOS.

Some open access journals charge an article processing charge (APC) when an author wishes to (a) publish an article online allowing for free public access and (b) retain the copyright to the article. APCs range from several dozen dollars to several thousand dollars per article. Read more about APCs at Wikipedia.

Open access in Myanmar

University of Mandalay and University of Yangon set up their own open access institutional repositories in 2015 and Yadanabon University, Yangon University of Economics and Yezin Agricultural University in 2017. In 2020 they became part of MERAL, which has involved 19 Myanmar universities to date. MERAL will be the first ASEAN national portal. You can find out more about MERAL in this video (Myanmar and English languages).

In addition to initiatives like MERAL, which encourages the sharing of research on a CC BY 4.0 international licence, there are a number of Myanmar university researchers already publishing their work in journals on open licences. Some of examples of papers from Myanmar authors are available in the additional resources section.

If you are a librarian, you may also want to explore whether your institution could join the Myanmar Academic Libraries Consortium (MALC), which enables affordable access to research.

Your own practice

You can find a range of open access journals via the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Perhaps you could share some of these with your colleagues? Or highlight a selection for a particular discipline in the library?

Earlier we looked at evaluating openly licensed resources. In much the same way, it is a good idea to evaluate different journals before deciding where to publish research. If you are a librarian, you may want to advise colleagues what to consider before they decide where to publish. As we saw earlier, authors who transfer copyright may lose the ability to post their research on their own websites. The Think, Check, Submit checklist provides a useful list of essential things to consider before submitting research to any journal. There are also tools such as HowOpenIsIt? which can help you assess how ‘open’ a journal is. You might want to consider sharing these resources with colleagues who may be interested in publishing their research. If you publish your own university journal, you might want to consider applying a Creative Commons license to the journal - discuss this further with the editorial board.

Some universities have open access publishing policies. For academic librarians interested in developing an open access policy for their university or institution, the Harvard Open Access Project has developed a toolkit. Yezin Agricultural University reused this policy wording when adopting their policies. University of Mandalay, University of Yangon, Yadanabon University and Yangon University of Economics also have open access policies and other universities participating in MERAL are in the drafting process.

Librarians can also help scholars understand how different publishing options affect the audience and prestige of their work. Impact factor is a primary metric of prominence of a journal or publication, measured by a journal’s average number of citations. Because impact factors are not necessarily a reliable metric of a journal’s importance, some publishers like Nature are reconsidering the importance of impact factors for journals. Many open access scholars encourage systems like altmetrics to provide another way of thinking about impact beyond the traditional metrics. In 2017, 1science released a study finding that on average, open access papers produce a 50% higher research impact than strictly paywalled papers. You can find out more about the benefits of open access in the additional resources section.

Open access publishing is one way you can be ‘open’ in your research. To find out more about open science and open research, see the additional resources section.

Final remarks

Universities play a major role in advancing scientific research, and academic publishing is a key way to communicate findings with colleagues and the public. As organisers of knowledge within institutions, librarians can work together with university researchers to promote access to information. Other ICT and technical staff can also support these types of discussion at your university. You can do this by educating on the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of open access, answering questions about copyright, and providing guidance and recommendations to maximise the reach and impact of scholarly publishing in particular fields. You can find further material to help support you in the additional resources  section.

6.2 Opening up your institution

“Licence to Share” was produced by Visual Thinkery for TIDE project, part of the UK-Aid-funded SPHEIR programme (spheir.org.uk), and is licensed CC BY 2.0

This section explores how you can support educators and students in using open content. It also explores ways in which your education institution might be able to support open education content, practices and community.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this section of the course you will have considered different ways you might want to raise awareness of the new Myanmar Copyright Act and OER at your institution.

Reflection

Is your university or college ready for the new Myanmar Copyright Act?

Do you think that openly licensed resources have a place at your university? If so, how could you support their use? What benefits might they bring?

Introduction

In the last section we thought about different ways we could support colleagues at our university to find and publish in open access journals. How else can we support colleagues and students at our university to understand both the new Myanmar Copyright Act and OER? Librarians, ICT and support staff can play an important role in finding, developing, licensing, curating and sharing OER, as well as preparing your institution for the changes that will happen as a result of the new Act.

What can you do?

The new Copyright Act

With the forthcoming changes to Myanmar’s copyright law, it’s important to raise awareness of what the new Act entails at your university and college. This is particularly important because once the two-year transition period ends, penalties will apply for copyright infringement. You could:

  • host an event or invite a speaker to your university or college to explain what the new Act means for you
  • make copies of the new Act available to educators and students
  • summarise the key points from the Act and what it means for your university students and educators
  • create resources to remind colleagues why and how they should reference the materials that they use
  • offer to review materials to check referencing
  • keep up-to-date with developments via national organisations such as MIPRA and get involved with some of the initiatives discussed in this course.

The benefits of OER

You might also want to raise awareness of the existence of OER and openly licensed resources and the benefits for your students and colleagues. You could:

  • host an annual ‘open education’ day at your university or college
  • showcase and curate open resources that students and teachers might want to use, or OER that your students and educators have created
  • hold events to teach students and colleagues about Creative Commons and open education
    • You can reuse existing OER (such as this course!) and other OER to help you.
    • If a licence permits, you may also be able to remix the material to better suit your university – just remember to attribute!
    • You might also want to review your responses to the reflections in Section 4.2, where you considered why OER might be useful to your institution.
  • meet regularly with colleagues to discuss OER or study courses on OER, open research and open access
  • highlight sites and tools that help you to find OER and open access research, for example EIFL’s leaflet How can I get access to the article I need?

If you are a technical member of staff, what kinds of openly licensed software could be used at your institution?

Creating OER

You might want to support the creation of open access and OER at your institution. You could produce resources or hold events for educators that advise on open access publishing and its benefits. You may also want to review your institution’s policies – the following questions may be useful to ask:

  • Who owns the material you create at work? Check for any institutional policy you may have. If it’s not clear, who would you need to ask to clarify? What does any policy mean for open licensing of materials?
  • Could your university develop its own open licensing policy? Who would need to be involved in developing the policy? You can find further information on OER policies in the additional resources section.
  • Could your university develop its own OER? What about taster courses for students, for free? Where would you share these resources?
  • If educators are creating courses, could you find OER that might support a course’s development and advise on licensing and attribution?
  • Where do colleagues publish their research? Are these journals open access?
  • Could your university be involved in initiatives such as MERAL?
  • Developing case studies and showcasing good practice can help inspire others to get involved or consider using openly licensed resources. Could you work with your colleagues to share good practice with others in this way?

Your own practice

What about your own practice? You could:

  • consider developing and sharing OER that you have created
    • If you take pictures on your phone, perhaps you can share photos of your town with others? If so, remember to think carefully about what CC licence you might use and how you might make it accessible to others.
  • share information about the new Copyright Act and tell family and friends about some of the resources and initiatives discussed in this course.
    • Are they aware of the new Copyright Act and how it might affect their lives?

The wider OER community

Finally, what about connecting with the wider international open education community? You could:

  • join the Creative Commons Open Education Platform to help identify, plan and coordinate multi-national open education, practices, and policy projects to collaboratively solve education challenges around the world
  • find out more about the CC Global Network and consider working with colleagues to set up a Myanmar chapter of Creative Commons
  • Find out how people are creating and using Creative Commons resources in the new Creative Commons podcast “Open Minds… from Creative Commons”
  • showcase Myanmar initiatives, projects, case studies and resources by adding them to the OER World Map.

Final remarks

By working with colleagues across the university, we can help to provide the best possible teaching and learning and support innovative research. Open practices and OER can help us to share our university research and resources with a wider audience, and enable us to discover and share a wider range of material to support and supplement learning. As the new Myanmar Copyright Act is implemented, we need to all be aware and prepared for what it means for our university learning and teaching.

Unit 6 quiz

6.3 What next?

Image credit: Good morning Yangon in HDR… by Piktour UK is licensed CC BY 2.0

We hope you have enjoyed this course!

Reflection

Is open education relevant to Myanmar? What do you think would encourage open education in Myanmar?

Where are you going next on your open education journey?

We hope that participating in this course has enabled you to reflect on your own practice as well as find out more about the new Myanmar Copyright Act and openly licensed resources. We also hope that participating in the course has provided you with some new ideas and some interesting reading. If you haven’t done so already, the additional resources sections at the end of each unit provide lots of useful resources to explore.

This course is openly licensed, meaning that you can reuse and revise the material. Ideas for future adaptations include further updating the copyright section and translating the course into other dialects and languages. As suggested in Section 6.2, you could also make use of the material within your own institution and develop new resources, extend the material or make it more applicable for your own university context. Just remember to attribute!

Thank you again and wishing you exciting and fruitful adventures in copyright and open education!

Additional resources

6.1 Open access to scholarship

Courses on open access publishing and open research

Open access best practice

See the Budapest +10 recommendations for best practices in creating, adopting and implementing OA policies and processes. For example, ‘when possible, funder policies should require libre OA, preferably under a CC-BY licence or equivalent’.

More publishing tools

Several tools exist to help faculty and scholars understand their rights and publishing options, and to help them exercise those rights. The Scholars Copyright Addendum Engine can be used by faculty and other authors to amend publication agreements when submitting an article to a traditional publisher. The engine allows authors to choose among different options to reserve rights for themselves, and generates an agreement that is then submitted with a traditional publication agreement to make that legally effective. Additionally, Authors Alliance publishes myriad resources about these tools and open access, and PLoS offers resources and articles about the benefits of open access as well.

(Note that the SCAE and the addenda were updated by Creative Commons in 2019.)

Open access myths debunked

For teachers and students, open access can seem like a scary new world, particularly as the pressure to publish has increased. There are many guides to debunking the myths of open access publishing – and reading them carefully to dispel any fear or misunderstanding is crucial in the current academic landscape.

Critiques of the existing academic publishing system

There are several critiques of the existing academic publishing system. SPARC has an excellent summary of the key points on its open access page, some highlights of which are pasted below:

  • Governments provide most of the funding for research – hundreds of billions of dollars annually – and public institutions employ a large portion of all researchers.
  • Researchers publish their findings without the expectation of compensation. Unlike other authors, they hand their work over to publishers without payment, in the interest of advancing human knowledge.
  • Through the process of peer review, researchers review each other’s work for free.
  • Once published, those that contributed to the research (from taxpayers to the institutions that supported the research itself) have to pay again to access the findings. Though research is produced as a public good, it isn’t available to the public who paid for it.
© 2007–17 SPARC, licensed CC BY.

Myanmar researcher publications

Some examples of open access research publications by Myanmar scholars:

Dr Pho Kaung, rector of the University of Yangon; Saw Lin Oo, Department of Physics, University of East Yangon; Zayar Thu, Department of Physics, Maubin University; and Than Zaw Oo, Department of Physics, Panglong University:

  • Oo, S.L., Thu, Z., Oo, T.Z. and Kaung, P (2017) ‘Optical and electrical properties of antimony and fluorine doped tin oxide thin films’, Universal Journal of Physics and Application, 11(3) pp. 91–6, doi: 10.13189/ujpa.2017.110304 (online). Available at: http://www.hrpub.org/ journals/ article_info.php?aid=6120 (accessed 16 September 2020). Copyright © 2017 by authors. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence 4.0 International Licence.

Ko Ko Kyaw Soe, Pro-rector, Meiktila University, and Moe Moe Aye, Assistant Lecturer, Than Than Win, Lecturer, and Yin Maung Maung, Department of Physics, University of Yangon:

  • Aye, M.M., Win, T.T., Maung Maung, Y. and Kyaw Soe, K.K. (2014) ‘Binary oxide photoelectrode with coffee natural dye extract for DSSC application’, International Journal of Innovation and Scientific Research, 8(2), pp. 276–82 (online). Available at: http://www.ijisr.issr-journals.org/ abstract.php?article=IJISR-14-179-02 (accessed 16 September 2020). Copyright © 2014 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Researchers from the Department of Geology, University of Yangon, who collaborated on the project, supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Union of Myanmar, that also organised the fieldwork campaigns, described in the articles below:

  • Jaeger, J.-J., Soe, A.N., Chavasseau, O., Coster, P., Emonet, E.-G., Guy, F., Lebrun, R., Maung, A., Khyaw, A.A., Shwe, H., Tun, S.T., Oo, K.L., Rugbumrung, M., Bocherens, H., Benammi, M., Chaivanich, K., Tafforeau, P. and Chaimanee, Y. ‘First hominoid from the late Miocene of the Irrawaddy Formation (Myanmar)’, POLS ONE, 20 April (online). Available at: https://doi.org/ 10.1371/ journal.pone.0017065 (accessed 16 September 2020). Copyright: © 2011 Jaeger et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Wah Wah Min from the Department of Zoology, University of Yangon:

  • Zin, W.W.M., Buttachon, S., Buaruang, J., Gales, L., Pereira, J.A., Pinto, M.M.M., Silva, A.M.S. and Kijjoa, A. (2015) ‘A new meroditerpene and a new tryptoquivaline analog from the algicolous fungus Neosartorya takakii KUFC 7898’, Marine Drugs, 13, pp. 3776–90 (online). Available at: https://www.mdpi.com/ 1660-3397/ 13/ 6/ 3776 (accessed 16 September 2020). This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
  • Tiwary, C., Haq, M., Vaitheeswari, S., Kalaiselvi, M., Sikder, M. and Min, W. (2016) ‘DNA barcoding and intra species analysis of the ember parrot fish scarus rubroviolaceus using mtCO1’, IRA International Journal of Applied Sciences, 5(2), pp. 91–109, ISSN 2455-4499 (online). Available at: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.21013/ jas.v5.n2.p5 (accessed 16 September 2020). © Institute of Research Advances This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence subject to proper citation to the publication source of the work.

Sai Sein Lin Oo, Nay Myo Hlaing, Kyaw Myo Naing and Mie Mie Sein from the Department of Zoology, University of Mandalay, Thein Aung from Wild Wings, Yangon, and Tun Oo from Indo-Myanmar Conservation, Yangon:

  • Suarez-Rubio, M., Aung, T., Oo, S.S.L., Shwe, N.M., Hlaing, N.M., Naing, K.M., Oo, T., Sein, M.M. and Renner, S.C. (2016) ‘Nonbreeding bird communities along an urban–rural gradient of a tropical city in central Myanmar’, Tropical Conservation Science, 9(4) (online). Available at: https://doi.org/ 10.1177/ 1940082916675961 (accessed 16 September 2020). © the author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Licence (http://www.creativecommons.org/ licences/ by-nc/ 3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/ en-us/ nam/ open-access-at-sage) (received 11 July 2016, accepted 13 September 2016; published 1 January 2020).

Zar Zar Oo from Industrial Chemistry Department, Yadanabon University, Thwe Linn Ko from the Industrial Chemistry Department, University of Mandalay, and Soe Soe Than from Industrial Chemistry Department, University of Yangon:

  • Oo, Z.Z., Ko, T.L. and Than, S.S. (2017) ‘Preparation and characterization of chickpea protein concentrate’, International Journal of Development Research, 7(12), pp. 17720–24 (online). Available at: https://www.journalijdr.com/ preparation-and-characterization-chickpea-protein-concentrate (accessed 16 September 2020). Copyright © 2017, Zar Zar Oo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Soe Soe Than from Industrial Chemistry Department, University of Yangon, also published this article together with Thet Hnin Oo, corresponding author, and and Khin Swe Oo from the Department of Industrial Chemistry, University of Yangon:

  • Oo, T.H., Oo, K.S. and Than, S.S. (2019) ‘physico-chemical properties and sensory evaluation of fish seasoning powder’, American Journal of Food Science and Technology, 7(2), pp. 52–6 (online). Available at: http://pubs.sciepub.com/ ajfst/ 7/ 2/ 3 (accessed 16 September 2020). Published with licence by Science and Education Publishing, Copyright © 2019 Thet Hnin Oo, Khin Swe Oo and Soe Soe Than. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licences/ by/ 4.0/.

Researchers from the Department of Physics, University of Mandalay:

  • Nakashima, D., Hoshino, K., Itonaga, K., Kobayashi, H., Kinbara, S., Nakazawa, K., Soe, M.K., Theint, A.M.M., Tint, K.T. and Yoshida, J. (2017) ‘The alignment method of the emulsion plates for [symbol] hyperon tracking on J-PARC E07’, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Hypernuclear and Strange Particle Physics (HYP2015), The Physical Society of Japan (online). Available at: https://doi.org/ 10.7566/ JPSCP.17.033005 (accessed 16 September 2020). © 2017 the author(s). This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the article, journal citation, and DOI.
  • Yoshida, J., Ito, H., Kinbara, S., Kobayashi, H., Nakashima, D., Nakazawa, K., Soe, M.K., Theint, A.M.M. and Tint, K.T. (2017) ‘Scanning systems for searching double strangeness nuclei in nuclear emulsion’, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Hypernuclear and Strange Particle Physics (HYP2015), The Physical Society of Japan (online). Available at: https://journals.jps.jp/ doi/ abs/ 10.7566/ JPSCP.17.032001 (accessed 16 September 2020). © 2017 the author(s). This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the article, journal citation, and DOI.

Researchers from the Department of Agronomy, Yezin Agricultural University:

  • Htwe, A.Z., Yamakawa, T., Moe, K. and Dien, D.C. (2015) ‘Symbiotic effectiveness of different indigenous Bradyrhizobium strains on selected Rj-genes harboring Myanmar soybean cultivars’, African Journal of Microbiology Research, 9(49), pp. 2345–53 (online). Available at: https://doi.org/ 10.5897/ AJMR2015.7751 (accessed 16 September 2020). Copyright © 2020 author(s) retain the copyright of this article. This article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence 4.0.
  • Ko, K.M.M., Hirai, Y., Zamora, O.B. and de Guzman, L.E. (2017) ‘Agronomic and physiological responses of rice (Oryza sativa L.) under different water management systems, fertilizer types and seedling age’, American Journal of Plant Sciences, 8, pp. 3338–49 (online). Available at: https://doi.org/ 10.4236/ ajps.2017.813225 (accessed 16 September 2020). Copyright © 2017 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing, Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International Licence (CC BY 4.0) http://creativecommons.org/ licences/ by/ 4.0/.

More background on open access

More information about open access and OER advocacy

6.2 Opening up your institution

Institutional policies

With permission you could use the OER Policy Development Tool to build an open policy for your institution. You can find examples of open policies others have created at the OER Policy Registry (global) and North American OER policies and projects. You can also explore the OER World Map to find information on national, regional and institutional OER policies.

A Creative Commons policy in New Zealand gives teachers advance permission to disseminate their resources online for sharing and reuse. The policy also ensures that both the school and the teacher – as well as teachers from around the country and around the world – can continue to use and adapt resources produced by New Zealand teachers in the course of their employment. Creative Commons NZ has developed an annotated policy template for schools to adapt.

Library websites, library subject guides, cataloguing and Creative Commons

Librarians who find themselves in the role of content creator may wonder how to license their work. More than 5000 institutions in the United States use LibGuides as their preferred subject guide content management system, with more than 120,000 licence holders around the world. Licensing your resources under Creative Commons can be as simple as using the Licence Chooser to create a machine-readable button for your site or LibGuide.

There are hundreds of LibGuides on library websites about Creative Commons alone. Take a look at these search results and flip through the resources found by subject librarians on the issues of Creative Commons and copyright.

 Unit 6: You and your university
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