Hi everyone, Never a dull moment in the free culture world. Ordinarily -- I would not post public notifications around potential misunderstandings or oversights by a publisher. However, I find myself facing an ethical dilemma. Particularly since today I'm been commenting considerably on my personal ethics and views associated with the non-commercial restriction on our national New Zealand MLE list.
I was recently invited to write the forward for a new publication -- a book of tweets on open text books. Great idea, very cool and appropriate for our times. In response to the invite, my very first question was was: "More than happy to provide a "tweet" -- what license will you be publishing the book under?" Response: "We will be doing this under Creative Commons - Attribution - Share Alike license- http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ That is the current plan. Any interest in co-authoring?" My response: "I always check that anything I write is published under a free cultural works approved license :-) I would love to co-author" So I do my bit, read the text, write a short forward and contribute a tweet. I now see that the book has been published under a CC-BY-NC-SA license -- which is very unfortunate, because I think its a great text and it seems that there has been an oversight in attributing my contributions under a license which meets the free cultural works definition which was a condition of my contribution. (See: http://www.happyabout.com/thinkaha/opentextbooktweet01.php). I've asked the publishes to print and distribute an erratum indicating that my personal contributions are licensed under CC-BY-SA on the basis of our original agreement. I'm confident that they will do the right thing. When I submitted my tweet, I wrote: "This is licensed under CC-BY which will enable a derivative under CC-BY-SA." I did this work during official time, and my employers IP policy requires that I release my work under a default CC-BY license." If there were any communications from the publisher in the interim about changing the license -- I missed these ;-(. Moreover, for the record, I would not have agreed to having anything I write published under an NC license. It's ironic that while the book carries a NC restriction -- the international public can purchase the texts, hard copy or ebook for a listed price of $19.95 or $14,95 and see that currently some discount applies. Anway -- this is a public announcement that my forward is licensed under a CC-BY-SA license and my tweet - No 31 is openly licensed under a free cultural works approved license (CC-BY) in this case. The publisher was free to add an NC restriction on the tweet - -but has omitted to attribute the source :-(. For the record, both versions of the texts I submitted are licensed under a CC-BY license. You are free to take these texts, reuse them, adapt them, modify them and if you like sell them :-) Cheers Wayne -- Wayne Mackintosh <http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg>, Ph.D. Director OER Foundation <http://www.oerfoundation.org> Director, International Centre for Open Education, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. Founder and elected Community Council Member, Wikieducator<http://www.wikieducator.org%20> Mobile +64 21 2436 380 Skype: WGMNZ1 Twitter: OERFoundation, Mackiwg -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
