The next LTHEChat Wednesday 1st November 8-9PM (BST) will be based on questions from Jane Secker and Chris Morrison on Copyright and Open Practice.

Chris Morrison is Copyright Support and Software Licensing Manager at the University of Kent, responsible for copyright policy, licensing, training, and advice. He was previously the Copyright Assurance Manager at the British Library and before that worked for music collecting society PRS for Music. Along with Jane Secker he is co-author of the second edition of Copyright and E-learning: a Guide for Practitioners (Facet), and also co-founded the award-winning copyrightliteracy.org blog. He is a member of the Universities UK/Guild HE Copyright Working Group, has a postgraduate diploma in copyright law from King’s College London, and is currently undertaking a Masters research project into the interpretation and application of copyright exceptions in UK higher education.

Jane Secker is Senior Lecturer in Educational Development at City, University of London, where she teaches on the MA in Academic Practice. She is the former Copyright and Digital Literacy Advisor at LSE, where she coordinated digital literacy programmes for staff and students including copyright training and advice. She is Chair of the CILIP Information Literacy Group, a member of the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance and the Universities UK Copyright Working Group, which negotiates licences for the higher education sector. She is widely published and author of four books, including Copyright and E-learning: a Guide for Practitioners, the second edition of which was co-authored with Chris Morrison and published in 2016 by Facet.

Jane and Chris tell us more about their passion for copyright and copyright literacy.

“We’ve been running the website Copyrightliteracy.org website to promote the idea that understanding copyright is important for everyone, but particularly those that are in higher education in learning and teaching roles. We’re on a mission to make copyright fun, engaging and empowering, perhaps not terms usually associated with copyright? But understanding what copyright protects, and also what copyright exceptions allow you to do is fundamental to being  a good teacher. We’ve developed a number of open educational resources to teach people about copyright, including Copyright the Card Game and most recently, launched just last week, The Publishing Trap, a board game of scholarly communication, publishing choices and copyright.

In this chat we’ll discuss the importance of copyright literacy as a foundation to open practices and how before considering what we want to share, academics and students first need to consider what content they own, what they use under licence and what is available to release openly. Copyright impacts on decisions about making your own publications open access, and releasing teaching materials as OERs. It’s also really important if you are considering developing a MOOC. However, we’ve found it’s often not well understood and tends to be a topic people shy away from. Games-based learning can take away a lot of the anxiety that surrounds copyright education as well as engaging the audience. Join us to discuss this and other topical issues.”

Check out their website https://copyrightliteracy.org/about-2/ for more information ahead of the chat.

The storify from the chat will be added here: https://storify.com/LTHEchat/lthechat-no-94-copyright-and-open-practice 

The LTHEchat team