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 OER collections overall should migrate to richer document formats, preferably XML as the reference copy with automatic conversion to html, .pdf, and most any format handled by the http protocol; support embedded multimedia objects; and enhance access to sub-objects in documents. This will be increasingly important for translation into other languages and use on a variety of technology platforms.

Intellectual property issues are at the heart of OER. The majority of existing educational content is protected under traditional copyright with terms and conditions that must be honored within the “open” paradigm. The formally defined faculty, staff, and student community of a university generally have access to site licensed digital materials through their library and have access to most of the literature that would be cited in course material. Students purchase access to other materials in textbooks and course packs. But in opening up course material to the world, institutions must invest the time and expense to scrub the material to be sure that materials licensed for use in their formal community are not available to world. The citation or link can be there, but the target cannot. Outsiders generally have access to abridged versions of the material although they may find the material elsewhere. As earlier described in Section 2.2.5, the Hewlett Foundation has wisely supported Creative Commons to help mitigate the constraints of “all rights reserved” copyright.

All of this is modulated by concepts of “fair use” and by an emerging spectrum of interpretation of copyright in the digital realm. The Google Book Search project, for example, is raising questions such as whether displaying excerpts of text around a hit from a key word search constitutes copyright violation, or indeed whether the initial digitization and indexing violate copyright. There are similar ambiguities occurring around the access to orphaned works, those under copyright for which an owner cannot be found at reasonable cost. The Copyright Office has recently completed a study of this topic and described several proposed “solutions.”

The legality of using traditionally copyrighted materials will evolve, hopefully in the direction of more openness, but the impact of OER will hinge on how widely the suite of licenses supported by Creative Commons are adopted. Present copyright law defaults to full copyright protection of a work; Creative Commons provides means of overriding that default. It is important that the OER-inclined education community continue to increase awareness and adoption of the Creative Commons culture to produce resources intended for use in open participatory learning ecosystems.