Open publishing of teaching materials

Resources Open Publishing Open Subjects
  • 19 May, 2022

This is an automatic translation generated by artificial intelligence. May contain errors.

Any faculty member at the university may wish to publish some or all of the teaching materials they have prepared as open access. This guide explains how to do so.

By publishing them as open access, the materials will be easily accessible to faculty, students, and, in general, anyone interested in them. The materials can thus be consulted, used, and reworked, always respecting the original authorship, producing far broader benefits than if they had not been published in this way.

The teaching materials that can be published may be of many types: bibliographic materials (books, notes, collections of exercises or exams, presentations or slides, study guides, etc.), videos, audio, etc. Although each has its own characteristics, the process to follow to publish them openly will generally be the same for all.

How to publish teaching materials as open access

If you decide to publish a given teaching material as open access, the steps to follow are:

  • Verify that all the material, and the works included in it (for example, graphics), have been created by the person who will publish it, or that permission has been obtained to publish any third-party elements that may have been used under open access.
  • Choose the distribution license for the material from among those considered open access.
  • Mark the material with the chosen license.
  • Publish the material on one of the University’s Open Access Publishing Platforms.

Naturally, all authors of the material must agree to follow this process and the decisions made during it, and most fundamentally, to the choice of license.

Let us look at these steps in more detail.

Verification of ownership and permissions

The content of the material will, in general, belong to those who created it. But sometimes some third-party elements are used (photos, graphics, audio, etc.). Therefore, as a preliminary step to publishing the material (whether open access or not), it is important to ensure that all the content is ours, or that we have permission to publish it under the chosen license.

If elements are detected that have been included without permission, it is advisable to remove or replace them before publishing the material, or, if possible, to obtain permission from their author to include them. If permission is obtained from their author, they may be included, always acknowledging authorship, properly citing the original work, and, if applicable, mentioning the conditions under which permission was granted.

Special mention should be made of elements that have a free license. When this is the case, they may be included in the material, always properly citing the original element and its authorship.

In addition, keep in mind that for excerpts from third-party works that should be cited for academic reasons, you may be able to rely on the right of quotation:

The inclusion in a work of excerpts from other works, whether written, sound or audiovisual, as well as isolated works of a graphic or figurative photographic nature, is lawful, provided that such works have already been disclosed and their inclusion is made by way of quotation or for analysis, commentary or critical judgment.
Such use may only be made for teaching or research purposes, to the extent justified by the purpose of such inclusion and indicating the source and the name of the author of the work used.

Consolidated Text of the Intellectual Property Law,
Royal Legislative Decree 1/1996, of 12 April
(Article 32: Quotations and reviews and illustration for educational or scientific research purposes, Section 1)

When the work to be published is by several authors, it may be advisable to have a formal document, signed by all of them, in which they mutually recognize their joint authorship.

Once you have completed this step, you will have a material ready to publish, as it will include only your own work and work that has permission to be included.

Choice of license

The next step will be to choose the license under which the material will be published, from among those recognized as “open access” by the University’s Open Publishing Council.

The author, by virtue of being the author of the work, originally holds all rights to it. Whoever receives that work can only exercise the rights that the author has granted. The recipient cannot reproduce, redistribute, include it in a compilation, or create a derivative work (such as an update or a translation), for example, unless permission is obtained from the author.

In the case of open access publishing, the license is the text that indicates what permissions you are granting to whoever receives your work, automatically and without them having to ask you for specific permission. In general, these permissions will include those detailed in the most common definitions of open access publishing. For example, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access states that for a work to be considered published as open access:

“The author(s) […] must guarantee the free, irrevocable and worldwide right to access the work, and license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display it publicly, and to make and distribute derivative works […]”

Berlin Declaration on Open Access,
22 October 2003

URJC Open Publishing Council has recognized the following as open access licenses (which meet the most common definitions of open access):

  • Creative Commons Attribution.
    In summary, this license allows sharing (copying and redistributing the work in any medium or format) and adapting (remixing, transforming and building upon the material for any purpose, including commercially) the work, provided that proper attribution is given (credit is given appropriately, including a link to the license, and indicating if changes have been made to the work).

  • Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike.
    In summary, this license allows the same as the above, with the same attribution condition, but also including the “ShareAlike” condition (if you remix, transform or create from the work, you must distribute the new work under the same original license).

In other words, whoever receives a work under a “CC Attribution” license can create derivative works and distribute them under any license they wish, including traditional “all rights reserved” licenses, whereas if they receive it under “CC Attribution-ShareAlike” they can also create derivative works, but can only distribute them under the “CC Attribution-ShareAlike” license. In other respects, both licenses work in the same way (in both cases the works can be copied and redistributed, for example). In both cases, the authorship of the original work must be acknowledged.

The license must be agreed upon by all authors of the work. If a document of mutual recognition of authorship has been signed, the chosen license for its distribution can be included in it.

Once the license has been chosen, you will have what you need to move on to the next step.

Marking with the chosen license

Once we know which license we are going to use, we have to mark the material with that license. To do this, ideally we should include in the material a text similar to the following:

©2022 Autora Mengánez Zutánez  
Some rights reserved  
This document is distributed under the  
“Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International” license of Creative Commons,  
available at  
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.es

The year is the year of publication, and “Autora Mengánez Zutánez” would be the name of the person who is the author of the material (if there are several authors, the names of all of them will appear). Naturally, the reference to the license will be to the one chosen in the previous step.

The way to include this notice will depend on the type of material:

  • In the case of “book-style” materials, this text is normally placed on one of the first pages of the document, in the same place where the copyright notice and “All rights reserved” are usually seen in books.

  • In the case of other textual materials, this text can be placed on one of the first pages, or at the end of the document, if placing it on one of the first pages hinders reading. It can also be placed as a footnote. For example, in presentations or slides it is common to place it at the end, on a specific slide; in short article-type texts it is common to place it as a footnote.

  • In the case of videos, it can be placed as a short clip at the beginning or, more commonly, at the end, usually in the same place and in a similar way to how credits are included.

  • In the case of audio (for example, a podcast), it is common to read it aloud at the beginning, right after the introduction, or at the end. Usually in the same place where the credits are read.

  • In general, we must find a way to include it in the material that allows the license to be easily found and identified, but adapted to the type of material and interfering as little as possible with its normal use.

And with this we will be ready for the last step.

Publication

The process ends with the publication of the material.

For the publication of the material, the University has a series of Open Access Publishing Platforms for different types of materials. The main ones are:

  • The University’s Open Archive,
    BURJC Digital.
    Follow the instructions described in “How to publish”
    on the BURJC Digital website.
    Along with the material (normally in PDF format) you can (and it is advisable to) deposit a compressed file (ZIP) with the material in editable format
    (Word DOC or DOCX, LibreOffice ODF and other tools,
    LaTeX, etc.), and other related materials, such as photos, figures, data, software, multimedia documents, etc.

  • The University’s video and audio service,
    TV URJC.

A short time after the deposit has been made, the material will be deposited and publicly available in the Open Archive.

What happens next

Publishing on these platforms will provide a unique address (“DSpace handle”, in the case of the Open Archive), normally represented by a URL or hyperlink, for the material. This address will be preserved by the platform so that it remains over time and can be found by Internet search engines.
In the case of the Open Archive, this address, together with the metadata of the document (title, authorship, abstract, etc.), will also be included in bibliographic electronic indexes, so that it can be located by bibliographic search engines, as well as general search engines.

With this, the teaching material (and the other materials deposited with it) will become part of the universal knowledge published as open access, and will be available to all of humanity.