All week in classes and at orientations people have been asking us to explain why we are in this program, and what our research interests are. I expect lots of people who know me already may be wondering the same thing. The answer I keep giving is that I’m in this program because I saw something that was broken in higher education – the system of scholarly and educational publishing – and I felt like I couldn’t fix it from my position as a librarian, approaching the problem one interaction at a time. I wanted to be able to approach it from a place where I might be able to make a bigger impact, at the level of organizational, institutional, and governmental policy, and to do that I was going to need to learn a whole lot more about universities, systems, incentives, statistics, economics, research methods, sociology, psychology, and on and on. I needed to go back to school.

So here I am. At the moment, I feel like an insect between shells. I was in Washington D.C. during the great cicada bloom of 2004, and I remember hearing on NPR that the cicadas are very vulnerable and tender (and delicious) right after they have emerged from their nymph skins, before their new exoskeletons have a chance to develop. That’s how I feel right now (minus the delicious). I’ve shed the safety of a profession I still identify with quite strongly, but I haven’t formed the comforting exoskeleton of the new one yet. The shared culture and language and practice of this new field is foreign to me. I have a pat one-paragraph explanation for why I’m here, but I’m hyper conscious of the fact that my interests are likely to change several times throughout the course of the program, and also, I’m not always convinced that my reason is not terrible (I appear to have mastered imposter syndrome right out of the gate). Being a full-time student again feels a bit like being demoted, especially in a college town where I’m still sometimes mistaken for an undergrad.

But I’m really excited anyway. My professors are excellent, my cohort is excellent, and I’m getting paid to read and learn all day. Speaking of which, I have a couple more chapters to get through for tomorrow…

Today, we released a WordPress plugin into the wild (you can see the little button over in the sidebar), and our Drupal plugin will be out any day now. We’re shifting our focus to open content creators and publishers, people who want to make it easier for their users to attribute them correctly; after WP and Drupal, we have our sights set on learning management systems.

Laura Hilliger, our designer extraordinaire, gave shout-outs to the rest of the team this morning, and I’m inclined to do the same. This group remains a joy to work with, and I’m flabbergasted by how much we have accomplished in such a short time. A tip of the hat to Pat Lockley, our developer who never sleeps (would you say that you’ve become our developer lead, Pat? I think you have), Paul Booker, Hans Lemuet and Nathan Yergler, developers who do appear to sleep from time to time (but do excellent work nonetheless), and our Mozilla cheerleaders Ben Moskowitz and Matt Thompson.

Goooooo team!

Full description:

Academic libraries have focused increasing attention over the last few years on encouraging open access (OA) publishing among faculty authors. While some institutions have had success encouraging faculty to adopt OA policies, such a narrow approach is very limited. How can we as librarians work more broadly to foster a culture of sharing on our campuses, one that would improve access not just to peer reviewed scholarly literature, but also to teaching materials, data, textbooks, images, and all the other knowledge and creativity that is generated at colleges and universities?

When: Friday, April 1 · 12:15pm – 1:15pm
Where: Roundtable 27 (Exhibit Hall A, Pennsylvania Convention Center)

I’m very interested to hear what others are already doing to foster a culture of sharing on their campuses, and I also plan to have the group do some brainstorming so that we can walk away with concrete things we can do back at our home institutions. If we get stuck I’m likely to borrow the technique that Jane Park used to such great effect at Drumbeat: 1) Make a list of barriers to sharing on campus. 2) Pick one barrier, and make a list of possible solutions. 3) Pick one solution, and figure out how we might actually implement it.

If you’ll be at ACRL and you’re interested in openness on campus, I hope you’ll join me.

ACRL Roundtable: Fostering a Culture of Sharing by is licensed under a Attribution CC BY.
Based on a work at http://mollykleinman.com/2011/03/22/acrl-roundtable/.

Allow me to indulge in the sharing of a little back story. I’ve been involved with Open Attribute since its inception at the Drumbeat Festival last November. It all started in the peer learning tent on the first day of the festival, where Jane Park from Creative Commons was leading a workshop on open content. We broke into small groups to consider the question “What are the barriers to reuse of open content?” More and more people and institutions are publishing open content, but the reuse rates, as far as anyone can tell, are very low. What’s the point of open content if people aren’t using and building on it? After we came up with a list of barriers, each group focused on one and asked “What might some solutions be to this barrier?”

The group I was in quickly zeroed in on attribution, specifically, how confusing people find it. All of us had heard from individuals who resist using open content because they don’t understand how to comply with the attribution requirement. Workshops and how-to guides and step by step flowcharts haven’t reduced the confusion, so we thought, “What if we can just create attributions automatically? Like the citation generators in academic databases? Click a button and you can have a properly formatted citation in MLA style, APA style, Chicago style. Technically, there is no reason why we couldn’t do a similar thing for attribution.”

As soon as this idea came forward (no one remembers who said it first, but I think it was Jane), we all got really excited. We knew we were on to something. Here was a tool we could build to solve a problem that training alone hadn’t solved. And we had come up with it in a setting that was all about connecting the people with ideas to the people with the skills to make those ideas a reality.

At the end of the first day, we reported out on our idea to the whole Drumbeat festival, and a couple of people from Mozilla quickly reached out to offer support with coordinating the project. Several of us spent the second day of the conference working on an outline of the idea, some basic specifications for the tools, and some text that would help us recruit other interested participants. Most of that work is still hanging out in our neglected wiki page.

Mozilla asked me if I would be the “educator lead” for this project. I had no idea what that meant. I don’t think they did either. Nathan Yergler from Creative Commons was to be the “technical lead”. We created a Google group, participated in a couple of Drumbeat conference calls, and through some magical mix of Mozilla outreach, Twitter, and luck, we ended up with a great team of people who had the right skills and a huge amount of energy. At this point, I don’t think anyone knows or cares who was supposed to be the “lead” on the project; everyone pitched in and worked hard, and we made decisions on everything from development priorities to icon design more or less by consensus. Three months later here we are, launching our first tools.

I have never worked on a project like this before. Partly it’s that it was significantly more technical than anything I’ve ever done, with techier collaborators – I had to learn how to use IRC! But mostly it’s that here was a group of people, from vastly different personal and professional backgrounds, most of whom had never met in person, scattered all over the world, who spent substantial time working on Open Attribute just because they cared about it. Yes yes, this is what free and open software is all about, but I’m not a programmer, so I’d never experienced this kind of distributed collaboration before now. It is awesome. I am so proud of what our team has accomplished, and I’m excited to get to work on the next phase of development. Oh, and also, the add-ons themselves are great. I am already using them. They make attributing CC licensed content so much easier. Go install one.

A mini link round-up:

The full program announcement

The Department of Labor press release

The grants will provide postsecondary institutions with an opportunity to develop and make innovative use of a variety of evidence-based learning materials, including cutting-edge shared courses and open educational resources. These resources would be available online for free, greatly expanding learning opportunities for students and workers. In addition, these learning tools will help schools and students tailor education so each worker can have a better opportunity for success in the classroom and job market.

Mr. Hal Plotkin himself on the grants and their import

The materials produced as a result of these grants will carry the Creative Commons BY license, which also permits their free derivative use for commercial purposes. That means companies, schools, entrepreneurs, and others will be free to bundle, adapt, or customize the learning materials to create new offerings, products, and services. Schools will be able to affordably offer courses in subject areas and at levels of expertise previously beyond their reach.

Creative Commons, whose licenses make the whole thing possible

Congratulations to The Department of Labor, The Department of Education, and others involved in crafting this important, innovative program. Creative Commons is committed to leveraging this opportunity to create a multiplier effect for public dollars to be used on open, reuseable quality content.

Tech President, “Obama puts dollars behind open sourcing education”

[T]he Obama administration is putting a considerable amount of money — $500 million a year for four years, for a total of $2 billion, or what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described on a press call as “may be the largest investment into two-year institutions since the GI Bill” — behind the principle [of OER].

Chronicle of Higher Ed, “2-Year colleges get details of $2 billion grant program”

The announcement of the program’s details has been long anticipated by community-college officials. President Obama first proposed a major grant program for community colleges in 2009, shortly after taking office. He originally proposed a $12-billion plan to improve community colleges, called the American Graduation Initiative, but that plan collapsed during negotiations over legislation to overhaul student aid and the nation’s health-care system.

People are going to be talking about this for awhile.

Julià Minguillón, a computer science professor who spoke about digital preservation issues, described attempting to deposit an equation into his university library’s OER repository, only to be told that because his equation did not have a title, it could not be included in the collection. He then went on to criticize librarians’ obsession with the “useless” metadata of “author, title, date.” He argued that if we put librarians in charge of OER repositories (exactly the thing I argued for in my paper), we will sacrifice broad, immediate access in favor long-term preservation and proper metadata schemas.

R. John Robertson gave a paper about the role libraries can play in supporting OER initiatives but a significant portion of his presentation was given over to his concerns about librarian participation in this work. His experience with librarians is that they are so risk averse that the merest hint of a copyright issue is likely to send them running for the hills. Like Minguillón, he had anecdotes to back up his worries about librarians as obstacles in the field of open education.

In a word: Blergh! How did this happen? Why, despite biannual New York Times articles about how modern and hip librarians have become, are we still perceived on our own campuses as fearful impediments to progress?

Okay, I know why. Some librarians are fearful impediments to progress. Some librarians allow perfect metadata to be the enemy of good access. Some libraries, as institutions, do not foster innovation and experimentation, and are deeply resistant to change. It’s so disappointing.

It probably says something about the job I’ve had for the last year and a half that I see this primarily as a failure of management. On the plane to Barcelona I read a column by Meredith Farkas in American Libraries called “Nurturing Innovation: Tips for Managers and Administrators.” She offers a number of excellent suggestions for ways to adjust the institutional culture at libraries to support and embrace innovation: Encourage staff to learn and play, give staff time to experiment with potential new initiatives, keep an open mind, develop a risk tolerant culture. These suggestions kept coming back to me at Open Ed as I struggled to defend librarians and libraries against accusations of stodginess. I wanted to hand the article over to the people who complained about their uptight, change resistant libraries and say, “It doesn’t have to be this way. Go talk to your Dean. Make it better.” I also, in that way that sometimes happens, added one more suggestion to the list, thinking it was from Farkas but it’s from somewhere else, part of a theme that developed at Open Ed: Library administrators must make some room in their budgets for failure.

Innovation and progress can’t happen without failure. It’s how we learn, as individuals and as institutions and as species. Yes, library budgets are tight these days. Tighter than we ever thought they could get. With money so tight, and cuts so deep, it’s easy to think that now is not the time to take risks, but of course, now is exactly the time to take risks. How else will we prepared to address the challenges that await us in next year’s budget cycle, and the one after that, and the one 15 years from now?

To use one relevant example: The current commercial scholarly publishing apparatus is choking us. We know this. Knowing this, we have two choices: We can invest in activities that could ease the financial pressure – open repositories, deposit mandates, awareness campaigns – or we can choke. In this case, many libraries are experimenting, and sometimes those experiments even fail. As Farkas points out, when our experiments fail we still learn something valuable from them, something that can set us on a path to succeed the next time.

It’s not enough simply to encourage our staff to experiment. We need to give them money to play with, to set up a repository or buy a license to a promising tool or hire an expert to train staff in something new. It doesn’t have to be a lot of money, but it does have to be relatively free from strings. And then, we need to make sure our experimenting staff share what they’ve learned with colleagues in other libraries, the successes and the failures. It’s how we will all evolve.

So to wrap up this meandering post with a tidy bow: Higher education is changing, and our campuses are full of people (many of whom were at Open Ed and Drumbeat) experimenting with new models, tools, and philosophies related to teaching, learning, and research. The primary responsibility of academic libraries is to support teaching, learning, and research, and so those experiments and the people conducting them are highly relevant to us. We must make sure that we remain relevant to them. If they see us as an obstacle it is only a matter of time before we become obsolete. We want those experimenters and innovators to view the library as both a resource for and a partner in their work, and we can do that by funding innovation among our own staff, expanding our definition of the library’s role on campus, and embracing the possibility of failure. If we neglect to do these things, we don’t just risk becoming obsolete, we guarantee it.

The most compelling element of this talk for me was Plotkin’s framing of the market for educational resources as an ecosystem. It began with an anecdote: At Foothills De Anza Community College, where Plotkin worked for many years, he saw at the start of each term students roaming the college bookstore, course catalogs in hand, trying to figure out which courses they could afford to take based on how expensive the textbooks were. Economic considerations were often the most important factor that students used to decide what course they could take.

There was a statistics professor at Foothills De Anza who had created his own textbook, and sold it through the college bookstore. Another statistics professor came to campus, and she wanted to create an open stats textbook, one that would be available to students for free online. The college helped her do this, and then there were two statistics classes available to students, one with a free textbook and one with a textbook they had to buy. Students voted with their feet, and enrollment in the class with the proprietary textbook dropped so low that the college nearly cancelled it. It also turned out that students in the OER class did better in subsequent stats classes, probably because they could keep their textbooks instead of selling them back to the bookstore so they could afford books for the new term. Over time the faculty member with the proprietary textbook finally understood what was happening, made his book open, now there are choices between two different open textbooks and sections on campus.

This shift from closed to open happened at Foothills De Anza Community College, not by mandate or new requirements, but by the creation of an alternate OER universe, one that is so advantageous to the community that, and I’m quoting Plotkin here, “in the natural biology of things it overtakes the less useful organism that’s part of our enterprise.”

Expanding on this story, Plotkin argued that what’s most effective in changing the culture is to look for the adopters of OER and to impel or encourage our governmental entities and governance structure in higher education to support the faculty members who want to engage in OER scholarship and the OER community. We can do this without wasting any energy in trying to convince those who are not convinced. We have enough opportunity on our hands, enough interested scholars and faculty members around the world who want to participate in this alternate academic universe that we can spend all our time fruitfully engaging them and working with them without ever wasting our time on the opposition. Over time, if we continue to nurture and support the faculty who want to be a part of a different structure, an open structure, a sharing structure, these stronger, healthier practices will overtake the old, closed practices, and push them towards extinction.

This is not a new argument. Here’s the part that was new to me: We don’t need to do this by changing the copyright law. We don’t need to attack the existing structures head on. We don’t need to fight against anything. We can let the Elseviers and Cengages keep their life plus 70 copyright terms and their draconian licensing practices. All we need to do is help open educational resources flourish – on a giant scale, a federally funded scale – and soon enough, the tough old dinosaurs of commercial publishing will evolve or die out.

Plotkin’s talk focused on the role of government and higher education administrators to support open models of educational publishing, but I think it applies just as well on a micro level. Rather than trying to convert the masses of faculty who have never heard of OER, or who actively oppose it, librarians and other proponents of sharing on campus should focus all of our time finding, reaching out to, and supporting the faculty and students on our campuses who already get it. I’ve been thinking a lot about how exactly we can do those things, and I hope to write more about it in the coming weeks.

“So, what does ‘Open Access’ mean when you talk about it?”

Flustered, I said something about how the organizers of international Open Access Week tend to focus on the classic definition and scope of OA, meaning peer-reviewed scholarly articles available for free online, preferably with open licenses attached. I also explained that the institutions I visit for Open Access Week tend not to have much expertise about copyright or publishing, and so rather than talk about Open Access what I actually do is teach a basic introduction to copyright and scholarly publishing. That’s all true, but it didn’t really do justice to the question. The definition of open access, and more importantly the public understanding of what open access means, was never terribly clear, but lately it seems to be getting fuzzier. That’s what my professor was really asking about.

As more and more open movements have sprouted and expanded over the last few years – open peer review, open education, open government – it gets harder and harder to tease them apart. Open means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and we can’t assume that a roomful of people who care about openness care about the same thing. Chances are they really really don’t.

Within the Open Access movement alone there are a growing number of tactics for achieving openness, not to mention a gradual loosening of the requirements for labeling something open. On the tactics front, we have the Compact for Open Publishing Equity, flourishing institutional repositories, deposit mandates from both funding bodies and research institutions, and good old fashioned outreach to faculty. As for loosening requirements, we have been conflating Open Access with Free Online Access for years. Things got even muddier when publishers like Springer and Elsevier started offering the “Open Choice” publishing option, which gives authors the “opportunity” to pay several thousand dollars to make their work freely available online. The other night a friend of mine mentioned that she and her co-authors were given several different options from their publisher, all confusing; she knew she wanted the one that would make their work free to everyone, but wasn’t confident she could identify which option would do that. She just told her co-author to look for the one that had open in the name, and hoped she was right. It’s all a far cry from the Budapest definition.

Is it bad, this watering down of Open Access? Certainly it makes it harder to talk about. It makes it harder to brand and market. But nobody owns open. That’s the whole point. Despite the fragmentation and confusion, ultimately I think it’s probably going to be better for the public and better for our future to have lots of people approaching the problem of how to improve access to knowledge and scholarly output from lots of different angles. Names and definitions are useful for raising awareness and building community, but the ultimate goal of the open access movement is to make itself and its definitions obsolete. If this movement succeeds eventually we won’t need to distinguish between open scholarship and closed scholarship. It will all be scholarship, and it will all be accessible.

Abstract (aka. tweet): Many university libraries are primed to run OER and OCW shops, but no one is doing it. The University of Michigan just might lead the way.

Reaching the Heart of the University: Libraries and the Future of OER

University libraries are well positioned to run OER production and publication operations, but so far most institutions developing OER or OCW have little or no integration with their respective libraries. Given a number of aligning factors, the University of Michigan (U-M) has an excellent opportunity to integrate Open.Michigan, its OER operation, with the Library. While the U-M Library’s established publishing apparatus is larger than that of most academic libraries, many institutions share elements that would make OER integration feasible in one form or another. We propose an interactive strategy session where we present the case for greater university library involvement in OER projects generally, with U-M as a case study.

University libraries were among the first OER producers. Early projects to digitize and share public domain materials were spearheaded by libraries in support of their missions to collect, preserve, and provide access to knowledge and information. The Making of America project was a Mellon Foundation-funded partnership among U-M, Cornell University, and the Library of Congress that created one of the first digital libraries of public domain content. Since then, the U-M Library MPublishing department has built a robust digital publishing program that includes a copyright office, an institutional repository, and an experimental unit that publishes open access scholarly journals, monograph series, public domain image collections, print-on-demand textbooks, and reprints. When it assumed responsibility for the University of Michigan Press in 2009, the U-M Library consolidated within MPublishing tremendous expertise in the skills necessary to create and publish open digital content. Recently, the U-M Library began exploring the addition of OER to its portfolio with a strategy to integrate Open.Michigan into MPublishing.

This is what makes Michigan unique. However, the key elements that university libraries share – and OER initiatives need – are infrastructure and relationships. Many university libraries already have the technical, service, and policy infrastructure in place that would provide economies of scale for nascent OER projects. Areas where existing library infrastructure could support OER includes search and discovery, scholarly communications, assessment, metadata and indexing, and institutional repositories. Assessment skills are particularly valuable at this moment as the budget pressures that have pushed academic libraries to scrutinze how their resources and instructional services affect learning are also beginning to shape the world of OER. Meanwhile, most university libraries have a central and trusted position in the lives of faculty, students, and administrators on their campuses. Librarians support curriculum development, guide instructors to appropriate course content, and assist with research. Libraries are already at the heart of universities, which would make mainstreaming OER much easier.

When an OER shop is a stand-alone unit isolated from the day-to-day activities of students and faculty, it becomes difficult to sustain. To achieve long-term sustainability, university-based OER projects need a stable and well-funded home. Libraries could provide that home, and the University of Michigan, which has already established an ethos of sharing and a policy of open licensing in its library, is poised to figure out how.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, it’s worth heading over to the post on the Offbeat Bride site because the comments have been lively. Lots of photographers weighing in, which shouldn’t have surprised me.

Copyright, Creative Commons, and your wedding photos

I’m really excited by the amazing success we had negotiating with our wedding photographer around copyright, and I wanted to share what we did with the Offbeat Bride community.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I’m a librarian with a background in publishing who frequently does outreach and education about copyright. None of this is legal advice, etc.

Okay. So before I explain what our photographer is doing for us, you need a very very abbreviated introduction to copyright. (I’m sorry, I’m a librarian, I have to teach you things, I can’t help myself).

1) The purpose of copyright law is to promote the progress of science and art. Hardly anyone knows that anymore. So many people think it’s about generating profit for the music industry and giving individual artists total control over their work, but that’s just not true. Once upon a time, copyright law was balanced between the needs of creators and the needs of the public. Things have gotten really unbalanced over the last 40 years, but the goal of serving the public and promoting progress is still in there.

2) Copyright protects creative works that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression. This means that in order for something to be protected by copyright, it has to be recorded some way, on paper or on a hard drive some other physical thing. There are several classes of creative work that qualify for copyright protection: literary works, musical works, dramatic works, choreographic works, pictorial, graphics, and sculptural works, motion pictures and other audiovisual works, sound recordings, and architectural works.

3) Copyright does not protect ideas or facts. Those are free for anyone to use, even if it makes them look like they’re biting someone else’s style. A work has to be at least a little bit creative to qualify for copyright protection. Something that is purely factual, like a phone book, does not have enough creativity to be copyrightable even if it takes a lot of effort and hard work to make it.

4) Copyright attaches to a work automatically the moment it is recorded. There is no need to register the copyright, or to put a little (c) on it, or even claim it. If a work is relatively new (created in the last 50 years or so) creative, and recorded in some way, it’s almost definitely copyrighted. Copyright also lasts a really long time (currently, life of the creator plus 70 years after the creator dies). This means that most of what you find online is under copyright, even if there is no copyright symbol and no attribution and no source listed.

5) Copyright comes with a set of exclusive rights. These are things the copyright holder can do with the work that other people mostly cannot do (there are some important exceptions, but it would take way too much space for me to go into them here). The rights that come with copyright are: 1) The right to make copies. 2) The right to distribute copies. 3) The right to make derivative works. 4) The right to perform or display the work. The copyright holder may keep these rights to herself, or she may give some or all of them away, usually with a contract or a license.

So what does any of this have to do with your wedding photos? Everything. The way the default rules of copyright ownership work, the photographer you hire to shoot your wedding holds the copyrights in your wedding photos. She is free to sell them, publish them, Photoshop them, and share them. You are not. I hear all the time from people who believe that because they are the subjects of the photos, or because they are the ones who hired the photographer, then they are the ones who hold the copyright in the photos. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Those exclusive rights are hers, not yours.

But that’s just the default. You can change all that with the contract you sign when you hire your photographer. Most wedding photographers these days do retain the copyrights in the photos they take of your wedding, but they may give you a license to make personal, non-commercial uses of your photos. This is especially common when photographers offer a CD or DVD containing the high-res files of all your pictures. You usually have to pay extra, but a license like this means you can print copies yourself, post your pictures on Facebook, and send them to your friends, without asking for permission and without violating your photographer’s copyright. These are all good rights to have, and I highly recommend reading your contract carefully to see if you get them, and if you don’t, to ask.

For me and my boyfriend, a personal license was absolutely the bare minimum of what we would accept from our photographer. We’re both copyright nerds, and we knew we needed a license to use our own wedding pictures. But what we really wanted – and ended up getting – was more. A couple of weeks ago in the post about the XKCD save the dates, Ariel alluded to something called Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a system that allows creators to attach a license to their work that gives certain permissions to the whole world. There are several Creative Commons licenses to choose from. All the licenses require that whoever uses the work must attribute the creator and provide a link back to the original. Other options permit only non-commercial uses, forbid derivative works, or require people who build on a work to share the new work under the same license as the original. Many photographers, artists, musicians, and authors – including the ones who make a living from their art – now use Creative Commons licenses because they recognize that it is good for them. They always get credit as the creator, and it’s easier for people to discover and fall in love with their work when fans are free to copy and share it. I love love love Creative Commons because it has made possible a huge pool of new creative material that we are free to use and build on without worrying about copyright infringement. This is especially exciting to librarians and educators like me and my boyfriend, but anyone who loves remixes or mashups or funny cat pictures on the internet should appreciate how much better life is when people feel free to build on the creative work of others.

So back to wedding photos. Instead of a license that would just allow me and my boyfriend to use our wedding pics, we wanted a license that would allow anyone in the world to use our photos. We wanted a Creative Commons license. I really didn’t think we’d be able to convince a professional photographer to license our photos this way, but we did, and it wasn’t even that hard. First, we found an amazing photographer who already offers a personal copyright license along with the CD of high-res files. This way, we already knew we had someone who didn’t feel the need to retain complete control over the images. Once we’d gotten past the initial email exchange figuring out whether she was available, telling her how much we loved her work, describing our offbeat wedding plans, etc., I explained in an email a little bit about Creative Commons and why it was important to us, and I provided a couple of links to information where she could learn more. I was afraid we’d lose her right there, but to my surprise, she was just excited to be working with people who actually understood copyright law, and was totally open to hearing more about CC. Then we set up a phone call where we could talk about all the usual stuff you talk about with a photographer, but in addition we discussed the CC license. I explained again why it was important to us, and talked about ways in which it could be good for her as well. We agreed that it would have to be a non-commercial license – anyone who wanted to make a commercial use of a photo, like for advertising, would have to contact her for permission. Her biggest concern was that if the license was attached to high-resolution versions of the photos it would be too easy for people to make infringing uses, especially in print. Ultimately, we compromised with an agreement that we would be allowed to attach a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license only to low-res versions of the files. This is enough to allow for web-based reuses of our photos, but was limited enough that our photographer was comfortable giving it a try. We edited the language in her standard photographer contract to reflect the new license, and that was it.

Contracts can be intimidating and full of legalese, but it’s really worth taking the time to understand what is in your agreement with your photographer, and to negotiate for more rights if they’re not in the standard agreement. I was surprised by how much we were able to get just by asking.

If you want a concise overview of what Creative Commons is and why it is valuable, I highly recommend this video.