Open Licence Literacy: Given to Know, Give to Grow

Open Licence Literacy: Given to Know, Give to Grow Joshua Chalifour Digital Scholarship, Journalism, and Communication Studies Librarian [email protected] @[email protected] - Mastodon Rationale Consider the licence: rights & consequences to our info ecosystem or BY NC ND SA Attribution No Derivatives Creative Commons conditions (rights) Creative Commons conditions icons available from https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads Share Alike Non-Commercial Scenario 1 A journalism student is a budding political cartoonist and created a powerful image. She wants it to reach as many people as possible. Not just for the sake of the message, but gaining recognition could also support her future career. ●Who do I need to reach? ●How will they access it? Scenario 2 Together, epidemiologists and researchers from a university, public health agency, and a pharmaceutical company completed new research on a deadly virus. They want experts anywhere in the world to learn about their findings in order to prevent the virus from spreading. ●What is the potential for the impact of my work? ●Who can afford access? ●How could commercial incentives influence the goal? Scenario 3 An author wrote an experimental, electronic novel about an AI researcher that devises a spooky new technique for machine learning. He found some interactive software code on the Internet that he would like to distribute with the novel to enhance the readers' experience. ●Can I use this in my work? ●What will happen to my work in the future? Scenario 4 A team of ecologists are ready to publish their research about the effects of clear-cutting on British Columbia's Great Bear rainforest. Their dataset includes geospatial coordinates of sacred Indigenous lands. ●Should I be the one conferring rights? ●What permission do I need to publish info? Motivatation and impact In addition to a licence that helps us carry forward our motives, we need to consider the greater context of its impact. Information literacy & licensing 1. Authority Is Constructed and Contextual 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” American Library Association, February 9, 2015. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework. Other licences for other rights & motivations Commons-based reciprocity licenses ●Peer Production License ●Platform Commons License Ethical licences ●Nonviolent Public License ●At The Root ●Hippocratic License (aligns free and open source software with human rights) ●Free and open source software licences + Commons Clause ●Open Data Commons (data-specific) ●Open Font Licence ●Nwulite Obodo Open Data (African) ●Licence libres du Québec (LiLiQ) ●Open Government Licence (Canada) ●Contributor Covenant (community conduct) ●Spectrum Licence (Concordia’s research repository) Information literacy is needed for open licences What should I give? What do I get? Related resources & bibliographic information Association of College and Research Libraries. “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” American Library Association, February 9, 2015. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework. Brunelle, Zachary, Jonathan Mann, and Utopian Turtletop Productions. Paywall : The Business of Scholarship . Edited by Russell Stone. [Potsdam, New York]: Utopian Turtletop Productions, 2018. https://concordiauniversity.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1051042159. Emery, Christina, Mithu Lucraft, Agata Morka, and Ros Pyne. The OA Effect: How Does Open Access Affect the Usage of Scholarly Books? White paper. Springer Nature, 2017. https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-cms/rest/v1/content/15176744/data/v3. The First Nations Information Governance Centre / Le Centre de la Gouvernance de L’information des Premières. Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAPTM): The Path to First Nations Information Governance . The First Nations Information Governance Centre, 2014. https://fnigc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/OCAP-Brochure-2019.pdf. Hovious, Amanda. “Toward a Socio-Contextual Understanding of Transliteracy.” Reference Services Review 46, no. 2 (2018): 178–88. https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-02-2018-0016. Knievel, Jennifer E. “Instruction to Faculty and Graduate Students: A Tutorial to Teach Publication Strategies.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 8, no. 2 (2008): 175–86. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2008.0020. Mackey, Thomas R., and Trudi E. Jacobson. “Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy.” College & Research Libraries 72, no. 1 (2011): 62–78. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl-76r1 Secker, Jane. “The Revised CILIP Definition of Information Literacy.” Journal of Information Literacy 12, no. 1 (2018): 156. https://doi.org/10.11645/12.1.2454. SPARC Europe. “The Open Access Citation Advantage Service (OACA).” https://sparceurope.org/what-we-do/open-access/sparc-europeopen-access-resources/open-access-citation-advantage-service-oaca/ What went into this presentation & their licences ●Signika font → SIL Open Font License ●LibreOffice → Mozilla Public License ●Inkscape → GNU General Public License, version 3 ●confused image by Muh zakaria (Rationale slide 2) from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0) ●Creative Commons logo and rights images trademarked by the Creative Commons ●Public domain image used in slide backgrounds modified by Joshua Chalifour from: Seaver, Robert, Bruce Rogers, and Pforzheimer Bruce Rogers Collection (Library of Congress) DLC. Ye Butcher, Ye Baker, Ye Candlestick-Maker : Being Sundry Amusing and Instructive Verses for Both Old and Young, Adorned with Numerous Woodcuts. The Library of Congress. Boston : Houghton Mifflin ; Cambridge : Riverside Press, 1908. http://archive.org/details/yebutcheryebaker00seav. ●GNU/Linux operating system →GPL v2 and a variety of other FOSS licences. Thank you Download the slides from: Joshua Chalifour Digital Scholarship, Journalism, and Communication Studies Librarian [email protected] @o[email protected] - Mastodon This presentation is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Open Licence Literacy: Given to Know, Give to Grow Joshua Chalifour Digital Scholarship, Journalism, and Communication Studies Librarian [email protected] @owl[email protected] - Mastodon Abstract: Joshua Chalifour will explore one of many ways that academic libraries can support researchers in adopting open practices. He will focus on the value of improving literacy in open licensing. Drawing from his experience as Digital Scholarship Librarian and founding member of Concordia's Open Science Working Group, he will discuss how open licensing bolsters the scholarly ecosystem and extends into public and private sectors. The rights granted through open licences have ramifications for peoples' information seeking, research, creation, and sharing practices, which underpin open scholarship. Although applying and using open access licences appears simple on the surface, people frequently misunderstand what these licences assert. Libraries can serve as catalysts for cultural change, providing essential technical and practical support for open scholarship. One way in which libraries support this is through an information literacy approach that helps people make sense of potential outcomes through conscientious decision-making around licences. Rationale Consider the licence: rights & consequences to our info ecosystem or Within open scholarship, librarians promote open access, help people navigate publication rights, advocate for open infrastructure, and we're heavily implicated in the technological elements of research and learning. Licensing is something that spans those areas of work. When used well, it can underpin a lot of possibilities for finding, accessing, creating, and preserving scholarly work. I've noticed a problem, in that people aren't very confident in their knowledge of how open licence rights work. I think our work in the realm of **information literacy** provides a useful approach to that problem. We need to improve understanding of information rights and restrictions in order to help people enculturate their own their practices with open scholarship. Over the next few minutes I'll talk about what this sort of literacy involves and hopefully inspire some ideas about what more we might do. BY NC ND SA Attribution No Derivatives Creative Commons conditions (rights) Creative Commons conditions icons available from https://crea tivecommons.org/about/downloads Creative Commons conditions icons available from https://creativecommons.org/about/downloads Share Alike Non-Commercial Creative Commons licences provide for four conditions (essentially rights), which are: - Attribution to ensure we know who authored a work - Share Alike to require that permissions get passed along to others - No Derivatives to prevent the distribution of modifications to a work - and Non-commercial to allow distribution only in contexts that are not, for profit We can combine these conditions in various ways to create six different licences. Applying and using open access licences, such as these, can appear simple on the surface. However people often misunderstand what these licences assert. The skills to consider sometimes far-reaching licensing consequences can extend into professional careers even outside academia. Scenario 1 A journalism student is a budding political cartoonist and created a powerful image. She wants it to reach as many people as possible. Not just for the sake of the message, but gaining recognition could also support her future career. ●Who do I need to reach? ●How will they access it? I regularly teach a workshop on finding and making open scholarship with Creative Commons licenses. During one part of the class I pose hypothetical scenarios to the participants and I ask them to vote and then debate which licences would suit each scenario the best, if at all. I never see perfect agreement, which is good. There are a lot of grey areas in the possible outcomes. When participants reflect on the motivations the people in each scenario have, they envision different ways that the licences could support those. I'd like to share four of these scenarios. I'll refer to them later in context with information literacy skills. Here's the first: When thinking about her motivations for sharing her work, she might wonder: - Who do I need to reach? - How will they access it? Those questions of access involve different media, different platforms, even technical capacities, which are directly supported by a system of rights that could smooth or prohibit distributing her work. Scenario 2 Together, epidemiologists and researchers from a university, public health agency, and a pharmaceutical company completed new research on a deadly virus. They want experts anywhere in the world to learn about their findings in order to prevent the virus from spreading. ●What is the potential for the impact of my work? ●Who can afford access? ●How could commercial incentives influence the goal? They might question their approach to disseminating the info based on questions like: - potential impact - affordability of access - commercial incentives This scenario presents a complicated issue, where the researchers want to minimise the possibility of a terrible thing happening. Depending on where they're based they probably have certain publishing responsibilities. We also know that when there is work from the private sector, there's going to be an important financial consideration. Licence rights define ways that those requirements can play out. Information literacy & licensing 1. Authority Is Constructed and Contextual 2. Information Creation as a Process 3. Information Has Value 4. Research as Inquiry 5. 6. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” American Library Association, February 9, 2015. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework. #### 4. Research as Inquiry - This addresses questioning and the iterative aspects of doing research. The more broadly that information can be accessed, the more it can be questioned and provoke directions of research. - Understanding what's needed for the sorts of investigation, debates, and collaborations that are part of the research process lends weight to an environment supported by open licences. - Back to my scenario of the author wanting to distribute some code. Software code **is information**. We might imagine this scenario as one, perhaps narrow case, exemplifying where research as inquiry could come in to play. When code is openly licensed, a person can examine it and learn from it in order to change it or otherwise experiment with it toward their own purposes. - A licence supporting that openness, that ability to derive something new, also supports iteration and supports the interaction of people pursuing that information. Prohibiting access, curtails intellectual curiosity. Information literacy & licensing 1. Authority Is Constructed and Contextual 2. Information Creation as a Process 3. Information Has Value 4. Research as Inquiry 5. Scholarship as Conversation 6. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” American Library Association, February 9, 2015. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework. #### 5. Scholarship as Conversation - In this frame, we recognise how there are many voices and perspectives that contribute to different research areas. It includes the notion of accepting a complex and involved range of discourse. We often end up with a few perspectives receiving undue privilege or exposure. This is in part because restrictive rights are frequently imposed by legacy publishing and distribution regimes. - For example, there's a scene in this film, [Paywall: the business of scholarship](https://concordiauniversity.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1051042159), that made an impression on me. A professor, Brian Nosek, at the University of Virginia (and Director of the Center for Open Science) talked about an experience he had visiting the University of Belgrade. He described how he was talking to the students there and discovered that most of them were doing their theses on essentially the same subject matter. He asked why they all chose to work on aspects of the same thing and their response was that that was where they had access to the literature. - That scene calls attention to how restricted the scholarly conversation becomes when licences make access to research, unaffordable. - The scene also shows how beneficial it would be for someone to licence their own work in order to expand its potential reach. How, if we want to include more voices around the world, we need to consider the ways that restrictive permissions or proprietary licenses privilege those who can pay. Information literacy & licensing 1. Authority Is Constructed and Contextual 2. Information Creation as a Process 3. Information Has Value 4. Research as Inquiry 5. Scholarship as Conversation 6. Searching as Strategic Exploration Association of College and Research Libraries. “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” American Library Association, February 9, 2015. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework. #### 6. Searching as Strategic Exploration - A person's search process changes when they know that a particular licence will let them alter a work for their own use, or sell it, or do something else with it. They can use licensing knowledge to take advantage of search tools' features that guide them to the works provided with the appropriate rights. - As a creator, it's important to know how the licence you choose can be used to propagate rights information into these tools. Will people find your work in an expensive database? In purpose-driven search tools? - Returning to the Great Bear rainforest scenario, is it a good idea to indiscriminately distribute access to that data via search tools? See also https://search.creativecommons.org OpenAlex.org searches among different contexts, particularly with open access works. Qwant.com for images with specific rights openverse.org for CC licensed works 6 Continued Search tools like OpenAlex.org, Qwant image search, and OpenVerse.org support search techniques that focus on open access-licensed content or let the user specify specific licence permissions. Other licences for other rights & motivations Commons-based reciprocity licenses ●Peer Production License ●Platform Commons License Ethical licences ●Nonviolent Public License ●At The Root ●Hippocratic License (aligns free and open source software with human rights) ●Free and open source software licences + Commons Clause ●Open Data Commons (data-specific) ●Open Font Licence ●Nwulite Obodo Open Data (African) ●Licence libres du Québec (LiLiQ) ●Open Government Licence (Canada) ●Contributor Covenant (community conduct) ●Spectrum Licence (Concordia’s research repository) Depending on the goals, it could be worth considering licences other than the Creative Commons. Commons-based reciprocity (copyfair) licences, address a perspective in the **value** frame that I mentioned. Someone might choose these to support forms of mutual knowledge access and development through coops or not-for-profit entities. - Examples include the Peer Production Licence (a fork of the Creative Commons NC licence) or the Platform Commons Licence, which is for code. There are ethical licences such as the - Nonviolent Public License designed to protect against forms of violence, coercion, and discrimination - At the Root, provides similar rights to a CC licence, except these are restricted to people using it in compliance with a set of ethical standards. Those standards prohibit discrimination, environmental harm, suppression of workers' rights, and much more. - The Hippocratic License argues that technology is not necessarily neutral and so aims to be a licence for open source software communities to ensure their work is used in alignment with human rights. - There are hundreds of free and open source licences which focus mostly on permitting and propagating rights for studying, using, changing, and sharing software code. Many variations and philosophical differences exist among these licences. - The Open Font Licence addresses usage elements or commercial activities of concern to typeface designers. Various data licences exist, such as those from the open data commons, which distinguish between databases and their content. - Regional licences such as The Nwulite Obodo Open Data licence is interesting in that it calls attention to how people in African nations ought to be able to take advantage of their own data and it enables licensors to designate different terms for sharing data when they are from different parts of the world. - The Québec government has its own open source software licensing and the government of Canada like other governments make data accessible under specific open government licences. Information literacy is needed for open licences What should I give? What do I get? I hope that I've provided enough context about library information literacy work here to show how it relates to understanding and using licences. Working within open scholarship and open science practices necessitates reflection on what a licence does. The rights granted through open licences have consequences for peoples' information seeking, research, creation, and sharing practices. I think that the more people understand their rights and how best to confer those to others, the better they can take advantage of and contribute to the research life-cycle. *** Slide includes CC rights icons SA Remix ND NC Share BY Zero Related resources & bibliographic information Association of College and Research Libraries. “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” American Library Association, February 9, 2015. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework. Brunelle, Zachary, Jonathan Mann, and Utopian Turtletop Productions. Paywall : The Business of Scholarship . Edited by Russell Stone. [Potsdam, New York]: Utopian Turtletop Productions, 2018. https://concordiauniversity.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1051042159. Emery, Christina, Mithu Lucraft, Agata Morka, and Ros Pyne. The OA Effect: How Does Open Access Affect the Usage of Scholarly Books? White paper. Springer Nature, 2017. https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-cms/rest/v1/content/15176744/data/v3. The First Nations Information Governance Centre / Le Centre de la Gouvernance de L’information des Premières. Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAPTM): The Path to First Nations Information Governance . The First Nations Information Governance Centre, 2014. https://fnigc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/OCAP-Brochure-2019.pdf. Hovious, Amanda. “Toward a Socio-Contextual Understanding of Transliteracy.” Reference Services Review 46, no. 2 (2018): 178–88. https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-02-2018-0016. Knievel, Jennifer E. “Instruction to Faculty and Graduate Students: A Tutorial to Teach Publication Strategies.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 8, no. 2 (2008): 175–86. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2008.0020. Mackey, Thomas R., and Trudi E. Jacobson. “Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy.” College & Research Libraries 72, no. 1 (2011): 62–78. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl-76r1 Secker, Jane. “The Revised CILIP Definition of Information Literacy.” Journal of Information Literacy 12, no. 1 (2018): 156. https://doi.org/10.11645/12.1.2454. SPARC Europe. “The Open Access Citation Advantage Service (OACA).” https://sparceurope.org/what-we-do/open-access/sparc-europeopen-access-resources/open-access-citation-advantage-service-oaca/ What went into this presentation & their licences ●Signika font → SIL Open Font License ●LibreOffice → Mozilla Public License ●Inkscape → GNU General Public License, version 3 ●confused image by Muh zakaria (Rationale slide 2) from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0) ●Creative Commons logo and rights images trademarked by the Creative Commons ●Public domain image used in slide backgrounds modified by Joshua Chalifour from: Seaver, Robert, Bruce Rogers, and Pforzheimer Bruce Rogers Collection (Library of Congress) DLC. Ye Butcher, Ye Baker, Ye Candlestick-Maker : Being Sundry Amusing and Instructive Verses for Both Old and Young, Adorned with Numerous Woodcuts. The Library of Congress. Boston : Houghton Mifflin ; Cambridge : Riverside Press, 1908. http://archive.org/details/yebutcheryebaker00seav. ●GNU/Linux operating system →GPL v2 and a variety of other FOSS licences. Thank you Download the slides from: Joshua Chalifour Digital Scholarship, Journalism, and Communication Studies Librarian [email protected] @[email protected] - Mastodon This presentation is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.