Copyright:Support Guides/Open Courses & Educational Resources Copyright Guidelines/General Guidelines

General Guidelines

Instructors openly sharing teaching and learning materials should use public domain or openly licensed material covered by Creative Commons and other open, free-for-use licences. It is important to review the terms of the open license to ensure that you comply with any restrictions.

For all other copyrighted material, instructors should obtain permission from rights holders. The permission should be in writing (email will suffice). The SCCO will assist with seeking permission, but it is not always possible to contact rights holders. Instructors should submit permission requests to the SCCO at least 10 weeks in advance of when you will need it. Additionally, a file record of who gave the permission, what was permitted, the date, and how to contact the person who gave the permission will need to be kept. The SCCO will also assist in managing permission records.

It is always preferable to hyperlink to materials, rather than copy materials for distribution. Providing a hyperlink is not currently believed to be the same as making a copy or distributing a work, and can be done without permission.

Materials obtained electronically through UBC Library are generally not allowed to be posted on public websites. Wherever possible, instructors should provide access to these materials through persistent links (PURLs). For more information on PURLs, please see these short video tutorials. Please note that most non-UBC students may not able to access these materials.

There are lots of materials available for use in open courses or open educational resources. For details, see the What Copyright Allows You to Copy section below.

In many cases, the best decision might be to simply remove third-party copyrighted content that is not essential to the pedagogy of a learning unit, for example, purely illustrative content. Participants in open courses report that the experience is quite different than in a classroom, and the impact of purely illustrative content is reduced.

Instructors should always provide an attribution to the original source. This acknowledgement can be made at the end of a learning unit or contribution; it need not be included directly where the work is used, if that would harm the flow of the author’s content.

Generally, it is not practical to pay transactional licensing fees for content in open environments.

The fair dealing exception applies in open environments, but there are fewer express educational exceptions to rely upon. See the final section of these guidelines for more information.