It’s been reported numerous places that United Nations University has ramped up their OpenCourseWare project. An interesting aspect of the UNU OCW initiative has been the release of course materials under the Creative Commons Attribution license. The majority of other OCW projects have chosen to publish their materials under a version of the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. The debate about open licensing options continues (and hopefully will prompt more discussion here). While the CC-BY license is in essence more “free” from the get-go, it lacks the viral nature of the ShareAlike clause, which ensures that downstream remixes of content also remain free and open.
Full disclosure: I am a part time employee of Creative Commons, but do not endorse or recommend any specific CC license here or in any of these postings.
Hi Timothy:
Thanks for your post about the initiative. I am working with MERIT, one of the UNU institutes that participates in this initiative, and both within our institute and between institutes the license “question” has been debated. We finally agreed that each institute would be free to choose their own license for their respective materials.
MERIT standardises on either CC-BY-SA 3.0 or CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 for its materials, and UNU Online Learning (who are coordinating the initiative) chose CC-BY-SA for the site.
We had been considering the use of an Attribution license, and this conversation is still going on within UNU, but the text on the Terms of Use page was outdated. The updated version reads:
Course materials made available through UN University OCW are the property of their respective rights holders. Each participating UNU Research and Training Centre is free to select their preferred licensing preferences, and the materials on this site are not uniformly licensed (but will generally be either CC-BY-SA 3.0 or CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0.
I usually apply Attribution licenses to my personal work, but considering the public funding for most of MERIT’s courses, Share Alike might be a mechanism to increase future benefits from the investment. On the other hand, if commercial use is limited by the Share Alike clause, it might decrease diffusion of the work. I have not seen any research on this particular question, which would help us decide.