Nearly all AECC University College students, staff and visitors will be creating copyright material as part of their work and it is important to consider which types of intellectual property are being created, who owns the rights and how this affects its future use.
Digital methods of communication have fundamentally changed the nature of creation, publication and consumption of information and creative works. One important element of this change is a move from the restrictive all rights reserved model, where creators and rights holders expect users to ask permission to use their work, to a some rights reserved model where creators encode clear reuse permissions into their works to encourage sharing and reuse.
If you are producing research or any other material which will have an audience it is important to consider the intellectual property rights included and the conditions under which these will be made available. Many academics and institutions have embraced the Open Access movement as a way of communicating research as widely as possible and making the best use of public funds. However there will be a number of factors which you will need to bear in mind when deciding what licensing conditions should be applied to research outputs such as:
The JISC funded Web2Rights project provides a number of toolkits to help determine how any project or activity should approach the issues of intellectual property licensing.