Not all the content you might use in a given resource is of your own creation. You build upon the work of others and make use of content whose rights are held by individuals, corporations, and organizations around the world. Respecting the copyright of those who we borrow and build from is an essential component of strengthening the culture of sharing.

In this step, you assess the resources you intend to open to determine what content you can freely use or need to remove, and what you will need to seek permission to use. You also determine what you might be able to create on your own or what you could replace with openly licensed content.

Retaining content

- keep what's yours (and make sure you've got a license attached to it)

- keep what's licensed (the beauty of not asking for permission)

- DEEP DIVE: going deeper into copyright (exceptions and limitations) and the Casebook

- <create challenge>

- DEEP DIVE: implications for an international context

- <create challenge>

Replace and Remove

if it's not yours and you're not up for doing some copyright sleuthing, get rid of that risky content.

- replace content with openly licensed stuff; or make something yourself

- remove what's left over; usually, this is the content that's totally extraneous to the resource 

Hint:

As you go about assessing the resources, you can use a few tools to manage your progress. One we recommend is OERca: it keeps track of the decisions you make in clearing content and share comments with other dScribes. Of course, face to face meetings still provide the best results in creating OER, but the benefit of OERca is the opportunity it gives all involved to collaborate remotely and work at their own pace. We also like to use spreadsheets in Google Docs as a quick and lightweight tool to track our progress.