Publication of Open Educational Materials

Any university teacher can choose to publish some or all of the teaching materials they have prepared in open access. This guide explains how to do so.

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

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

How to publish teaching materials in open access

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

  • Check that all the material, and the works included in it (e.g., graphics), have been created by the person publishing it, or that permission has been obtained to publish the third-party elements that may have been used.
  • Choose the distribution license for the material, 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 fundamentally, in the choice of license.

Let’s see these steps in more detail.

Checking ownership and permissions

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

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

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

Additionally, keep in mind that for fragments of works that need to be cited for academic reasons, you may be able to take advantage of the right to quote:

It is lawful to include in one’s own work fragments of other works of a written, sound, or audiovisual nature, as well as isolated works of a plastic or photographic figurative nature, as long as they are already published and their inclusion is made for citation or analysis purposes. Such use may only be made for educational or research purposes, to the extent justified by the purpose of the incorporation, and indicating the source and the name of the author of the work used.

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

When the work to be published is by several authors, it may be convenient to have a formal document, signed by all of them, recognizing their joint authorship.

When you have finished with this step, you will have a material that is ready to be published, as it will only include your own work and work with permission to be included.

Choosing a license

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

The author, by virtue of being the author of their work, originally has all the rights over it. Whoever receives the work can only exercise the rights that the author has granted them. Whoever receives the work cannot reproduce, redistribute, or include it in a compilation, or make a derivative work (such as an update or translation), for example, unless they obtain permission from the author.

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

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

Berlin Declaration on Open Access, October 22, 2003

The University’s Open Publication Council has recognized the following licenses as open access (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 and format), and adapting (remixing, transforming, and building upon the material for any purpose, including commercially) the work, as long as proper attribution is made (credit is given in an appropriate manner, including a link to the license, and indicating if changes were made to the work).

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

In other words, whoever receives a work with a “CC Attribution” license can make derivative works and distribute them with any license they want, including traditional “all rights reserved” licenses, while if they receive it with a “CC Attribution-ShareAlike” license, they can also make derivative works, but can only distribute them with a “CC Attribution-ShareAlike” license. In both cases, the original authorship must be recognized.

The license must be agreed upon by all authors of the work. If a mutual recognition of authorship document has been signed, the chosen license 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 need to mark the material with that license. To do this, ideally, we should include a text similar to this in the material:

©2022 Author 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 “Author Mengánez Zutánez” would be the name of the person authoring the material (if there are several authors, all their names will appear). Naturally, the reference to the license will be to the one chosen in the previous step.

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

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

  • 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 its nature makes it inconvenient to put it on one of the first pages. It can also be placed as a footnote. For example, in presentations or slides, it is common to place it at the end, in a specific transparency; in short texts like articles, it is common to place it as a footnote.

  • In the case of videos, it can be placed as an opening or closing credit, usually in the same place where the credits are included.

  • In the case of audios (e.g., podcasts), it is common to locate it at the beginning, just after the introduction, or at the end. Normally, in the same place where the credits are located.

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

And with this, we will be ready for the final step.

Publication

The process ends with the publication of the material.

To publish 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 (usually in PDF format), it is convenient (and recommended) to deposit a compressed file (ZIP) with the material in editable format (DOC or DOCX from Word, ODF from LibreOffice 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.

Shortly after depositing the material, it 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), usually represented by a URL or hyperlink, for the material. This address will be preserved by the platform, so it will remain over time and be findable by internet search engines. In the case of the Open Archive, this address, along with the metadata of the memory (title, authorship, summary, etc.), will be included in electronic bibliographic indexes, so it can be located by bibliographic search engines, and also by general search engines.

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