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Open Content Definition: Permission to is not Ability to

Traditional educational resources differ from open educational resources in that open educational resources can and may be used in ways that traditional resources cannot.  This might seem like a trivial point to make, but too often I feel as though part of this discussion is neglected. David Wiley laid out in the Open Content Definition the attributes that a work must possess in order to be considered "open". (Wiley) These attributes can be separated into two categories; permission to, and ability to exercise activities prohibited by traditional educational resources.

Permission to

The permission portion of the open content definition is made up of rights that everyone has regarding an open work. Those rights are commonly referred to as The 5Rs and they are as follows:

  1. Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the Content
  2. Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways
  3. Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
  4. Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new
  5. Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions or your remixes with others
These points are general descriptions of permissions specifically and legally described, in whole or in part, by combinations of the Creative Commons licenses and other open content licenses such as the GNU Free Documentation License.  They are of utmost importance to the premise of open content, but they can be undercut if the ability to exercise them is not carefully considered.

Ability to

The permission to and ability to exercise the 5R activities are mutually dependent.  That is, ability and permission are of equal importance with regard to the 5Rs activities.  Without the ability to exercise them, the utility of permission to can be significantly or completely diminished. In order to be true to the permissions granted by an open content license, one must be able to affirmatively answer the following questions:

  1. Access to Editing Tools:  Is the open content published in a format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that are extremely expensive or exotic?
  2. Level of Expertise Required:  Is the open content published in a format that requires a significant amount of technical expertise to revise or remix?
  3. Meaningfully Editable:  Is the open content published in a manner that makes it essentially impossible to revise or remix?
  4. Self-Sourced:  Is the format preferred for consuming the open content the same format preferred for revising or remixing the open content?
These questions rarely receive the same amount of attention as the 5Rs despite the two being dependent upon one another.

Advice

My advice to anyone interested in creating open content is to first pick an open license keeping in mind that where a work falls on the open continuum completely depends on the permissions allowed by that license and the technical choices made in effort to be true to that license. An open spectrum that takes both permission and ability to exercise the 5Rs might take the form of the following where "source files available" corresponds to a spectrum of its own in which source files themselves can be thought of as being more or less open depending on how many of the ALMS Framework criteria they meet.

From most to least open:

CC 0, Source files available
CC 0
CC BY, Source files available
CC BY
CC BY-SA, Source files available
CC BY-SA
CC BY-NC, Source files available
CC BY-NC
CC BY-NC-SA, Source files available
CC BY-NC-SA
CC BY-ND
CC BY-NC-ND

For redistributing revised or remixed versions of this page: This material is based on original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at http://opencontent.org/definition/.

Wiley, David. “Defining the "Open" in Open Content and Open Educational Resources.” Opencontent.org, opencontent.org/definition/.

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