by Distance Learning

Copyright & Open Access

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As a distance educator, you are more likely to provide copies of materials for your students, since your students are less likely to be able to use library facilities on-site.

This material will probably include a mix of resources you develop yourself, material that is freely accessible on the internet and copies of, or links to, book chapters and journal articles.

When using others’ material it’s important to know what’s OK and what’s not in terms of copyright.

Copyright is complicated but the University’s tool for providing students with access to course readings – called eReserve – means that copyright compliance is taken care of for you.

eReserve sits inside Blackboard and Moodle and provides students with a list of readings for them to access. You must use eReserve if you provide students with copyright course materials – that is, other people’s copyright materials such as book scans or links to journal articles in library databases. This applies to both electronic copying via Blackboard and Moodle and in printed course readers.

While use of eReserve is required, you will find it is very much a service that helps ensure a consistent experience for students and improves access to resources for them, for you and the Library, while also providing you with at-a-glance statistics on how often students are accessing their readings. Find out more here.

Note that you don’t have to use eReserve if you just provide lists of citations for students to locate themselves, meaning you don’t actually copy anything. If you take this approach you should ensure your students have the skills to navigate the library catalogue, Google Scholar and other information seeking tools. Your subject librarian is a good person to talk to about these things.

For distance students, it’s especially important that they know how to access any resources that are behind subscription paywalls, as it can be very frustrating to be asked to read something but find access appears to be blocked. The eReserve service takes care of these access issues but by taking the approach of your students locating readings by themselves, you are helping to improve their research and information literacy skills, in line with the University’s graduate profile.

You are also encouraged, where possible, to use only open access materials for your courses from the growing body of open educational resources and freely accessible scholarly research. Seek advice from the Manager, Copyright & Open Access if you’re interested in pursuing this.

Sign up to the Open Otago blog mailing list for open access news and developments.

For more general copyright and open access information, visit this site.

Richard White, the Manager, Copyright & Open Access, can provide individual advice on any of these things.

Email copyright@otago.ac.nz
Tel 64 3 479 9976
Web www.otago.ac.nz/administration/copyright/