Estimated reading time for this article:
29
minutes.
Speakers:
Heather Caprette, Sr. Media Developer/Instructional Designer, Cleveland State University
Carla Myers, Assistant Librarian & Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, Miami University Libraries
Heather: Hello everyone. Welcome to the sixth session of the Open Education Network's Pub101 series of live presentations. My name is Heather Caprette, I'm coming to you from Cleveland State University in Northeast Ohio. I'll be your host and facilitator, moderator for today. As a friendly reminder, I'll share our orientation roadmap document that includes our schedule and links to session resources in the chat. Soon I'll be handing it off to our guest speaker, Carla Myers from Miami University Libraries to talk to you about memorandums of understanding when working with authors. As always, we will leave time for your questions and conversations. There may be many of you who have experience with this topic and we invite you to share your experiences and resources.
Next, I'll go over some housekeeping details. This webinar is being recorded and will be added to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2023 playlist. We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. Please remember there is a companion resource for these sessions, the Pub101 canvas curriculum, and you can find this at the link that I will share in chat. So I'll post three links for you for the housekeeping details, and now I'll hand it over to Carla to talk to us about MOUs.
Carla: Hi everybody. I'm so excited to be here today to talk about this topic. Heather, can you see my screen okay and hear me fine?
Heather: Yes, I can. Thank you.
Carla: Awesome, thank you for confirming. So I'm excited to be here today, not just because I love Pub101 and the Open Textbook network, excuse me, that should be Open Education Network, you can tell it's been a long week for me already, but especially to talk about MOUs because they can be such an interesting and helpful and useful part of the publishing process.
So when talking about a call from proposals previously, how do we move from a call for proposals to being to the stage where we are talking about an MOU, or Memorandum of Understanding? So we've talked about putting out the call for proposals, communicating the program expectations, what we're looking for to people in our campus community to get them involved in the publishing program. Those authors responded based on their understanding of what we were looking for. We selected projects based upon our perceived capacity and shared understanding with the author, and now it's time we really want to clarify things using a memorandum of understanding as that communication tool to kick off the whole publication process.
So a memorandum of understanding is a formal, although not necessarily legally binding way, to outline expectations from both parties. So as the author, what can they expect from us in terms of services and support? We in serving as a publisher, what do we expect from them in terms of formatting and deadline and resources and supplementals that are going to go into there? They can be as long or as short as you would like to have them be. I've seen memorandums of understanding that are 10 pages long. I've seen them that hardly take up half a page. So the great thing is there's lots of flexibility with MOUs to customize them to the specific needs of your publishing program.
So why have an MOU? I really like these because I feel like they set the tone for collaboration. We're both excited to partner together as the author and the publisher. Now let's sit down and outline what we want to achieve and how we are going to achieve it. Another thing I like, that it really formally establishes expectations for everybody involved. So I've been involved in publishing situations where I don't know how wires got crossed, but they kind of did.
So for example, we one time had a faculty member here who was really excited to be part of our open textbook publishing program. We reviewed the proposal, it seemed like a great fit. We got to the point where we were ready to accept it and I was talking about the MOU and one of the areas was talking about compensation, and in saying that we have a grant that goes along with this and that would be given to the faculty member to use in these certain ways, but that there was no remuneration beyond that. And the faculty member was like, "Wait, what about my royalties?" And we were like, "Oh, well this is open publishing, there are no royalties. It's put out there for free." And they hadn't necessarily realized that.
And it really made us reflect on what were we trying to communicate out when we were doing our call for proposals that led to that confusion and how could we better address things in the future to make sure they understand what we meant by providing that one time grant and then what might come after that. But without having sat down to talk through that MOU at that time, we could have gotten all the way through the publication process and then there was this expectation from them of receiving royalties that didn't come to fruition and that could have caused a lot of frustration. So it's really great for kind of formally laying out things.
And then when there's confusion, or maybe one side or the other, it can be either one is not living up to expectations it gives you a document to go back to and say, "Okay, what might we need to change here in order to meet the goals of what we're trying to achieve?" Or sometimes this was presented to us for a publication this way, in the MOU we stated that we need it this way. So putting that work back on them to go in and submit it in the format needed. So lots of useful things can come about as a result of using an MOU for your publishing program.
So there's a few things you need to consider. The first off is who is the agreement going to be between? So very obviously it is going to be between those creating the OER, whether it is one author or multiple authors. One thing when there's multiple authors, sometimes people have what we call a corresponding author. So if we have a project that's going to have five authors, the corresponding author, we send communications to them, they share it with the other authors, bring back the group decision and communicate it back to us.
There's some pros and cons with this model. I think the biggest pro is everybody's busy and if you're trying to get responses from five people, that can be a little bit harder as versus trying to get a response from one person. Sometimes I've seen authors talk ahead of time, if it's something big like adding or removing a chapter or moving something around, we all want to have input on it, but if it's just editing and wordsmithing and kind of basic things like that, the corresponding author can make the decisions in those situations. So it can facilitate communication in moving the project forward. The only times corresponding authors can sometimes be a little bit of a hangup is if you get to the point where the corresponding author isn't corresponding with you for some reason or they're making decisions or calls about the project that are outside what the group empowered them to do.
I will say when it comes to MOUs, if we are working with a group of authors, we require that all the authors be there for the discussion. We all sign the MOU together, we make sure we answer all of those questions ahead of time so they understand what that communication structure will be with the author. So that's on the one end, the author or the authors of the project.
On the other end is who is actually doing the publishing support. Sometimes that is the library, sometimes maybe it's a division or a specific department in the library or sometimes it's the academic institution itself. So here at Miami University, the MOU is kind of made on behalf of Miami University even though I am the one primarily supporting the publishing program. And the reason we do that is we make sure any rights or anything we're empowered to do with the MOU is tied more to the institution than one person or one role.
And the reason for that is people can move on. Maybe they win the lottery, maybe they decide to retire or leave the job or something, and if that project is just connected to my name, that can then cause some issues. Even having it tied to a specific role, people's job titles or roles can change. They might move into a new role and that's empty. So here at Miami University we choose to do it between the institution and the authors rather than any one person or role and the authors. That again, is completely up to you and your institution. I have seen libraries do it different ways. Sometimes it's between the library and the authors. Sometimes it's between the publishing department and the authors. Sometimes it's the institution. Again, here you can think about what two parties or what groups of parties is this going to be between and customize that to your institution.
Next you want to think about what is actually in that memorandum of understanding. And usually you're going to see two main groups. Number one, what are we expecting the authors to deliver? If we're talking about an open textbook, the text, that's probably going to include images, charts, figures. One big thing we always highlight in our memorandums of understanding is clearing permissions.
So when you are reusing third party content, under what context are you using that? If you are reusing images or charts or graphs, do we want those to be all Creative Commons license? If we are going to empower authors to reuse images, charts, graphs, things like that under user rights found in the law like fair use, to what extent do we want them making those decisions under, do we have the ability as a publisher to maybe override a decision that we don't necessarily agree with? Or if something is not made available under an open license, to what extent are they responsible going and obtaining permission from the rights holder to use that in the work? So very clearly outlining from the author, here is what we expect to get from you, as the project, your deliverables.
In terms of the institution, we outline here is a publishing support we are going to provide. Maybe in terms of finding contributors, so we have a student employee who is very skilled at graphic design and art and we are able to employ them to help support people publishing open educational resources by creating some of that artwork for them, so noting that that's a contribution. Maybe we say, as the publisher, "We're going to be willing to go out and find reviewers for your work, will you focus on writing it" We'll outline to what extent will we provide copying services, layout services, who's going to be doing those, whether we're doing those in-house or whether we're contracting with a third party like Scribe. And then the actual publication itself. What are our plans in terms of where this will live and when we hope to have that project published? So outlining what the author is delivering and then us as a publishing program, what that author or authors can expect from us.
What is your timeline? This is a big one. And I will say I helped founded and was an editor of a journal for 10 years. I recently completed a book that was published that took me almost five years. And if there's one thing I've learned being on both sides of the publication process as the editor and the author is that however long you think it's going to take you, double that, add on a few months and that might actually be more of a true reflection of the timeline.
Now I have some authors that have hit their timelines on the head every single time, in fact have turned things in early. But it's mostly been my experience, myself included, that life happens, that we set aside a week to work on a project, but then we got busy with something else at work that was assigned to us. We have ideas of when we will work on a project but then a family member gets sick or we're not feeling well or something else happens that this project has shifted to the back burner for a little while. What I tell authors is, "Let's set some initial dates for what we want to have this published. What are your goals for submitting things? But as we all know, life happens. If anything changes, talk to me. That's the biggest thing, is just let me know." Because if I know what's going on, then we can be flexible and shift those dates around as needed.
Where we run into the biggest need to shift dates is if we're contracting with a third party like Scribe and we tell them, "We want to utilize your copy editing services and we will deliver this manuscript in December." They might be planning on that project in December and if we want to shift it to February, that might mean shifting around of some of their other projects or they've booked other things for February but they can't get it till March. So us staying in communication with third party vendors we might work with.
So I think initially it's a really good idea to set up the due date of the deliverables from the author but realize that might be flexible and telling the author the exact same thing back, especially for things that we might be doing in-house like layout, that it's kind of a party of one with a little bit of support working on this here at Miami University. And while I set aside and focus time for this project, things can happen with me personally or other projects or things can come up at work and if my timelines are going to change in terms of getting things back to you, I will let you know. So I will say the dates are probably the thing that I have seen most often revisited as part of the memorandum of understanding.
Before we go into how materials will be submitted, Heather, do we have any questions on anything I've talked about so far?
Heather: Yes, we do. Carla, there's a question from Michael. He asks, "How do you include making content accessible in the MOU? Is this a faculty responsibility or the institution's?"
Carla: It is a little bit of both. So what we put forward is guides and best practices for our faculty members, and fortunately here at Miami University we have lots of resources to help them with that. So how do we want you designing your headings, so we know what is a title, a first, second, third level heading, things like that. One of the big things we really impress upon our authors is alternate text. So if you see this image here I have on the slide, I personally could come up with alternate text for this, but especially for a chart or a graph, we really want the author deciding what do they want communicated in that alternate text to put forward for the readers. So we generally in our style guide have a standard of these are the things you need to be doing for accessibility. And we very often hold them to a base level of things.
Like headings, whether they use the Microsoft Office headings or they designate the headings in some other way, we just need to know what those are and alternate texts tend to be the big ones. Beyond that, we do a lot of the accessibility stuff in the PDF, the final document on the backend in terms of publishing. But it's gotten to a point where there is so much work and setting a document up to be highly accessible that if the author's not doing the things on their end, we're going to keep sending that back. Bee Campus has a really great guide on accessibility and open educational resources and I encourage anybody to take a look at that. That's one of the things we very often direct our authors to think about or to engage with or to use as a resource when they're thinking about the accessibility of their document. Let me know if that helps.
And do we have any other questions, Heather?
Heather: I'm not seeing any more at this time.
Carla: Okay, I'll keep going on, but please hop in with questions when you have them, at any time. So another key thing is how will these materials being submitted, what do we need to get from the faculty author in order to move forward with publication on our end? This includes the manuscript file format. We require that they submit in Word, I know some faculty are more comfortable with some other programs, but it's easiest on our end if we're working from a Word document. If that's not the best fit for them, then that's completely fine. We can't bring them into our publishing program at this time, but so far we've had nobody turn us down because we've required word.
One of our big things is the requirement for graphics and images. So what resolution do we require those at? What size do we want those at? Because that's important for the finishing of the final documents. And then of course citations. And I say this with a sigh, because citations tend to be a struggling point in a couple different areas. Number one, things coming to us without a proper citation. So you have an image like this, which you know that the instructor didn't create, but we don't have a citation on it from where it came from or especially if it's a Creative Commons image, the citation we want to include in order to be in compliance with the work. I'm really big on references, so as I'm going through in proofreading, if I see an author's name, I'm going to the references and highlighting that off so that's included in there. And inevitably in the manuscript there will be resources cited that aren't in the bibliography or there's resources in the bibliography that I'm then not finding in the work itself. So communicating with the author, kind of what got lost here.
So one of the things we talk about upfront is our required citation formats and then just having a very in-depth conversation with them upfront that yes, sometimes it is a pain to stay on top of citations as you're writing, but doing so at the forefront as soon as you cite a document in the work, making sure you go instantly put that in the bibliography or when you're finding third party works, making sure you're capturing the information from where that comes from, it's going to save tons of time down the road in trying to go back and find those again and incorporate them in. My job's a lot easier when there's a citation in the bibliography that is not in the OER itself as versus a citation that's in the text of the OER or under an image or graphic that is not in the bibliography.
Copyright considerations, always my favorite part, and part of that is me being a copyright librarian, but I think this is one of the really exciting areas where we get to talk with them about the way licensing their work under a Creative Commons open license empowers them to retain the copyright in the work. So some of the questions are, is this being written by a single author? Are there multiple authors? If they're student authors, especially if those students are creating content as part of the class, do we need to have FERPA waivers or agreements, because that then is then considered an educational record to include that in the open educational resource.
Sometimes at institutions, OERs are classified as a work made for hire. So I'm going to pick on my colleagues here, say Amanda came to our publishing program and we're so excited to have the work and it's an exchange for the honorarium and publishing support that we're going to provide. We're going to call it a work made for hire so that the copyright is then retained by Miami University rather than Amanda. Now of course under the open license, Amanda is going to be empowered to reuse that in multiple ways. I know doing this is sometimes a little bit controversial, but one of the biggest benefits I will acknowledge is then if Amanda moves on to bigger and better things, we as the institution are empowered to reformat, do different things, bring in new authors, things like that with that work that we may have questions about otherwise depending on what Creative Commons license was chosen for that. So thinking about those authorship and rights holder considerations.
Certifications and indemnities. As far as MOUs go, I very often try to make sure that they are worded in plain language so they're easy for anybody who reads it to understand. And then we get to this part that says certifications and indemnities and people sound a little bit nervous, because they're big fancy legal words. Generally the certification, what I'm asking them to do is certify that the content I am presenting is mine is actually mine. I haven't plagiarized it or taken it from somewhere else and then indemnities that, in me saying this is my content, I'm indemnifying you from any liability that comes as a result of me not being truthful from that.
We also ask them to warrant that it doesn't contain any libelous materials, things like that. As the editor when you're reading through it you're almost always going to catch that if you are serving as the editor or the editor will, and then you can have a conversation with the author about maybe why they're including certain content in your concerns about it. But that is one of the more legally worded areas is the certifications and indemnities.
And then of course we have a section that talks about the open license, which one are you going to choose to attach to the work? Here at Miami University, we really encourage them to choose one of two licenses, either a CC BY, so a Creative Commons attribution license or a CC BY NC, a Creative Commons non-commercial license, just so that where it can't be reused for commercial purposes. Those are the two primary ones, we let the author choose from one of those two, which one they would like to assign.
Budget, we have another section in our MOUs discussing budget. And there's a couple of things that can go on in this particular area. Number one, what is the budget for the project? The budgets for our project I think have ranged from about $4 to about $10,000. It depends on the level of production they've needed, and very often it is a case by case conversation with the author or authors and how that money is going to be spent.
For the most part, it is almost always spent on production, on maybe hiring a graduate assistant to help create some of the content. Sometimes some of that is spent for permissions, works they wish to reuse that are not openly licensed and we don't feel fall within user rights like fair use. So outlining what types of expenses can be covered and can't be covered.
We have offered our faculty authors honorariums, but to a T, they have all said, "You know what, I'm not doing this for the money. Why don't we just put this back into the project?" But then if you are offering them an honorarium or a stipend, something you want to include in the MOU is how is that going to be paid out? Some institutions say, "We'll give you half upfront and we'll give you the other half when the work is published." Some institutions say, "We will give you the honorarium when the work is published, when it's finalized." That's something you can decide internally how you want to distribute those funds as well.
Something else you may want to include here is who is going to be paying people. So with the publication support we provide, generally, if there's any bills to pay, we have those come to the library and we pay them. I know at some institutions they just transfer the funds over to that particular author or author's department and then they are responsible for paying any bills out of that fund associated with those costs. So something to think about at your institution too, to include in the MOU, how are those payments going to be made?
And then contingency planning, issues almost always arise in publication, and that's just fine. And they very often arise on both ends. Life happens with the author, they're a little delayed in getting it in. They had hoped for permissions for a couple works, they weren't able to get those, so they need to recraft the chapter so they're a little delayed in getting that. On the publishing side, maybe another author is a little late in getting their manuscript in, so that delays you in getting their project started. Or maybe something happens at your institution, you have a water leak and the library's in chaos for a month and a half and that slows down production. So you can always go back and easily revise MOUs. In terms of citation style, they decide partway through, they want to use MLA instead of APA. Are you amenable to that? Okay, if so, we can reword that part.
Like I said earlier, changing the dates is the revisions I most often see. We do have language in our MOUs about canceling the contracts. And again, this can go both ways. We've had faculty who have the best of intentions in the world in getting these projects together, but then something happens. So for example, one of our authors was so excited about publishing their OER and then their department had left, and within one week they were made the department head and remained the interim department head for a year and a half. And they came to me and said, "Carla, it's such chaos right now. I'm so sorry, I don't have time for this project."
So we have language in our MOUs that basically says with 30 days notice, either side can cancel this agreement. And that's really kind of the only time we've pulled it out. And that was in a way a cancellation, but it was also, "Okay, we're just kind of sending this on the back burner. When you're ready to come back, we're excited to work with you again. We'll probably draw up a new MOU then based on any new practices we might have here as the library publisher or anything new you might want to see out of the project." But a cancellation clause has been nice to have in there for that reason.
Sometimes you'll have authors who just stop talking to you for whatever reason. It seems like to me, when I finally do get to have a conversation with them, it's almost always, "I was so behind in my project, I was so embarrassed, it was just hard for me to talk to you." So in that case, you can pull out the cancellation clause and say, "We've been corresponding for email for a while. It's been more than 30 days, I haven't heard back from you. At this point, as per our MOU, we're going to go ahead and cancel this project. If you would like to revive it at any time, please reach out to us so we can have a conversation about it." So that can be fortunate on both sides to have as a contingency in those extreme situations. Heather, are there any questions before I go on to drafting this document?
Heather: No, no more.
Carla: Okay, great.
Heather: Okay, thanks.
Carla: So as you start to draft your MOU one thing you want to be aware of in institution policies and procedures. I very often encourage folks to check with human resources at your institution or your legal counsel on this. So for example, if authors at your institution are unionized, there may be requirements in their union contract that this is seeing work upon normal duties and there's special considerations for compensation, how much time they can spend on it, things like that. And you certainly don't want to be in violation of that contract. So human resources can help make you aware of some of those requirements. Talking with legal counsel very often they'll just kind of be interested in what are you doing? Is there any language as the institution we might want to see in there, for example, in terms of if the institutional trademarks or logos or anything like that is going to be used. So having conversations with HR, legal counsel and administrators or your institution about this MOU you're putting together and their advice on anything they might want to see in it.
You can start drafting yours from the ground up or you can swipe somebody else's. I very much encourage you to swipe somebody else's, that's kind of what we did here at Miami University. There are some great examples shared in the publishing curriculum. And then also what we did is we took a look at my book contract and we're like, "Wow, looking in here, there's some language we actually like." And part of that was in terms of revisions. So if there comes a time where the work needs to be revised, that we would approach the original authors or authors first, but if they declined to do those revisions that we as a publisher would be then empowered to go seek other people to do those revisions. So we stole a little language from that as well that we like to work into our MOU.
So I think for most people it ends up being a little bit of both. Go take a look at those MOUs that are available in the publishing curriculum, pull pieces and parts from them that you think would be good for your institution and then maybe add in your own institutional language or practices to be reflected in that document.
Tips and recommendations. I already said this a little bit, but wherever possible use plain language. I've been working with US copyright law in contracts for almost two decades now, and I still even get a headache sometime trying to wade through the legalese. Chances are your authors, especially if they're in the humanities or if they're in the sciences, have never really approached this type of language before. And we really want them to understand what we are trying to communicate, both in terms of what we can offer and our expectations from them.
Organize the document logically, whatever that logic might look like to your institution. Very often what we do here at Miami University is the author expectations, the publisher expectations, timelines, budget, and then contingencies, and that's where we put, on the off chance something goes wrong, that we have 30 days to cancel.
The key areas you need addressed could be discussed or individualized to each MOU. So for example, we had the great question earlier about accessibility, that is so key to work into these open documents. A resource like a math textbook is going to have much greater accessibility considerations than maybe just a straightforward textbook. So what do you need from them in terms of accessibility or formatting to make sure you are effectively constructing that OER with the special needs. So making sure you address that in there as well for each project.
So here at Miami University, we inform them early on that we have an MOU that they will sign once they are accepted, we make that MOU available to them as part of the request for proposals so they can ask any questions or understand what our expectations are, so if they don't feel they can meet any of them or if they want to negotiate some of them, we can be doing that ahead of time. Something I do is I schedule a meeting with the author or authors and go through that MOU line by line. And the reason I do that is I never want anybody putting their name on a document that they don't thoroughly understand what they are agreeing to. So we go through each section, I ask if they have any questions, they can ask questions of me. And that's also a great place for, okay, let's modify this part a little bit, or let's change this part a little bit to suit the needs of the specific project just to make sure it's a well-informed document that we have a good chance of both sides meeting their responsibilities under it.
And then of course, being available to answer questions at any time. I always tell any author I'm collaborating with, communication is number one, you can't check in too often. Anytime you have a question about, "I found this and it seems to have an open license on it, but I have a question about the authorship. Do you mind taking a look at it?" Or in terms of citation, "How do I cite this particular work?" Or, "I've run into a problem, I've just been assigned another class that's going to slow down my work this week, can we take a look at my due dates and adjust accordingly?" Just being available to answer those questions about the MOU and the information contained in it.
Communicate, communicate, communicate on both ends. I know some publishing programs have monthly check-ins, weekly check-ins. I've been pretty fortunate that most of my faculty and I, we have good communication kind of on different levels or different timelines for each project, but for the most part we've been in a pretty good place about what's going on. Every now and then a month might go by and I haven't heard from somebody I normally hear from every two weeks, so I'll just dash them off a quick email, how is everything going? Is there anything I can help with? So keeping those lines open. Using the MOU as a guide for those check-ins. So the date was May 15th. Let's take a look and see what we had agreed upon due on May 15th. Do you feel like you're still on track to meet that? Do you think you need some additional time? If so, what does that look like?
When questions come up, when problems pop up, what in the MOU can be negotiated and what cannot? So maybe the budget cannot be renegotiated. Your institution set aside a specific amount of funds and this is what you've assigned to each project and you don't have any wiggle room in that budget. If they need a little bit more than that for some aspect of their project, "Well, unfortunately at this time, we as a publisher can't support that." "Can your department kick in some funds? Can we look at an alternate option?" So what is non-negotiable as versus what might be negotiable, like the citation format or like the dates. Be flexible where you can, because putting together an open educational resource, it's a project on both sides, but make it very clear upfront, here are the things we don't have any flexibility on.
So I think that's most of what I have. I've tried to work in some examples that I've encountered in supporting these programs. I welcome any questions you might have on all the content I've shared, or just about MOUs in general, or if you've had experience with MOUs. I would love to hear what those have been like for you.
Heather: Okay. I just want to say thank you again, Carla, for sharing your recommendations and expertise with us. So at this time, if you'd like to put any questions or comments in chat, please do. You can also raise your hand and I'll call on you and you can unmute your mic and share that way. Okay, here's one from Colleen. She says, "Thank you, Carla. Do you recommend requiring A MOU for OER adaptations in addition to new creations?"
Carla: Sorry, I'm muted. I would say that's up to each institution. So we have a program, let me make sure I have this straight, the Alternate Textbook Program, where we are putting together an OER from a class, really, they're not writing a lot of content, they're just pulling from different sources. In that situation, we don't require an MOU, more of a timeline. What content are you getting? How can I make sure the content we're making available is accessible? Things like that.
We focus more on MOUs for the OER creation because that's just such a huge project and we kind of do need certain things to fall in line because we are such a small shop in supporting those. But I could see an MOU from both sides. The one for adaptation could certainly be much shorter because they're already starting with a lot of that content ready-made. So what is their timeline for adapting that? Where might they need a librarians help to bring in some supplemental content that they're having trouble finding. So if you're going to have one there, I could see it being much simpler than a publication one.
Heather: Karen posted, "Carla mentioned, you can find MOU templates in the Pub101 curriculum," and Karen's posted the link to that curriculum in that spot.
Carla: Thank you, Karen.
Heather: I have a question. I was wondering, and this could be asked of the group as well as Carla, who holds the copyright to faculty and staff writing at your university? Do faculty need to ask the legal office for permission to put an open license on their writing or can they just go ahead and do it?
Carla: This is such a great question, and the answer is it depends. So I will say today, at the vast majority of institutions of higher education, normally when we think about faculty creations, you've been hired to teach a class, so you create PowerPoint presentations, study guides, tests, things like that, it would certainly fall within the work made for hire category of US copyright law. But most institutions of higher education have a campus intellectual property policy that for teaching faculty say, this is kind of an exception, that even though you are creating those in a work made for hire situation, you retain the copyright in those, although the institution may reserve the right to have a copy of your syllabus for accreditation or to have access to your teaching materials if you leave partway through the semester and they need somebody else to pick up teaching.
I have heard that there are a few institutions of higher education out there that do claim things as work made for hire. Now that's for regular faculty teaching and instruction. Open educational resources can kind of be their creation of a project on and above that. Here at Miami University, we still consider that a creation of faculty scholarship, and we say the copyright in that rests with the faculty member, although they give Miami University an exclusive worldwide perpetual and irrevocable license to reuse the content in any manner worldwide, blah, blah, blah. You can see how often I do this.
Heather: That's good to know.
Carla: I would say start by checking your campus's intellectual property policy and see if the answer lies there. If it does not, that is definitely one of the questions I would reach out to legal counsel about, how are we going to classify this, as faculty scholarship or as a work made for hire situation?
And that's also, especially when money is evolved, a good conversation to have ahead of time. I had a faculty member a while back who was asked by their department head to create an online class for lower level courses that any instructor could teach. She created the syllabus, she created all the lessons, she created all this content, and then the department said, "Okay, thanks. This belongs to the department now." And she's like, "Whoa, wait a minute. What? No, I created this. This is mine." And he said, "No, I paid you, this is mine." And because there was no agreement ahead of time, I very unfortunately got drawn into the middle of this with our legal counsel to figure out who owned the content. So having that conversation ahead of time can be really great to help avoid those frustrating situations.
Heather: Okay. Angelique Carson says, "Swiping from other MOUs provided a huge benefit when researching other program's infrastructure in building our pilot program. We found a wealth of items we needed to consider." And Haley says, "We, IU, encourage fellows in our projects to CC license their works since they retain copyright. We only ask for a non-exclusive license for preservation." And then Amanda said, "At Ohio State, faculty own their IP, Intellectual Property, and can license staff counts as work for hire, so we cannot. The university owns the decision about licensing." I just found that interesting because one of the law librarians mentioned something about at CSU faculty have to ask legal to put a Creative Commons license on their work. And I'm not sure how accurate that is, but it just seems like an extra step. But yeah, I'm just curious.
Carla: So it can kind of go both ways. So I'm a faculty librarian, so something like this PowerPoint presentation or a book chapter I might write, there's no question that I retain the copyright in that as a faculty member under our campus intellectual property policy. Now for our publishing program, say I create a publication manual, now maybe I'm doing that more within the scope of my job rather than faculty creative work and scholarship. So it could be that manual that I've created is considered a work made for hire. And in that situation, I could absolutely see, okay, since the university owns a copyright in that, they want me to go to legal counsel for that document to put an open license on it. But yeah, I would say take a look at the intellectual property policy at Cleveland State and there might be a little bit more clarity to find there when that open license is required, or permission for the open license is required, I guess I should say.
Heather: Yeah, it was a eye-opener for me. Do we have any more questions or anything anybody'd like to share? Okay, I will be respectful of your time. I just want to say thank you again to Carla for talking with us today, and thank you all for joining us to learn more about open textbook publishing. We hope that as we continue to share available resources and recommendations, one of your key takeaways is the sense that you are not alone in figuring out how to support open textbook authors. Remember that if you have more questions about today's session or would like to chat with others about it, you can do so in our class notes, which I'll put a link to in chat. We'll take a look at these notes and questions and comment there. And just as a reminder, next Thursday, May 18th, we'll have a session on working with authors presented by Abby Elder. We hope you can join us then. And please everyone, have a good rest of your day.
Carla: Thank you everybody, have a good one.
END OF VIDEO
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Pub101 is a free, informal, online orientation to open textbook publishing. This May 11, 2023, session is the sixth in our series this year. Host Heather Caprette of Cleveland State University is joined by guest speaker Carla Myers of Miami University Libraries for a discussion of MOUs.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
Heather Caprette, Sr. Media Developer/Instructional Designer, Cleveland State University
Carla Myers, Assistant Librarian & Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, Miami University Libraries
Heather: Hello everyone. Welcome to the sixth session of the Open Education Network's Pub101 series of live presentations. My name is Heather Caprette, I'm coming to you from Cleveland State University in Northeast Ohio. I'll be your host and facilitator, moderator for today. As a friendly reminder, I'll share our orientation roadmap document that includes our schedule and links to session resources in the chat. Soon I'll be handing it off to our guest speaker, Carla Myers from Miami University Libraries to talk to you about memorandums of understanding when working with authors. As always, we will leave time for your questions and conversations. There may be many of you who have experience with this topic and we invite you to share your experiences and resources.
Next, I'll go over some housekeeping details. This webinar is being recorded and will be added to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2023 playlist. We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms. Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. Please remember there is a companion resource for these sessions, the Pub101 canvas curriculum, and you can find this at the link that I will share in chat. So I'll post three links for you for the housekeeping details, and now I'll hand it over to Carla to talk to us about MOUs.
Carla: Hi everybody. I'm so excited to be here today to talk about this topic. Heather, can you see my screen okay and hear me fine?
Heather: Yes, I can. Thank you.
Carla: Awesome, thank you for confirming. So I'm excited to be here today, not just because I love Pub101 and the Open Textbook network, excuse me, that should be Open Education Network, you can tell it's been a long week for me already, but especially to talk about MOUs because they can be such an interesting and helpful and useful part of the publishing process.
So when talking about a call from proposals previously, how do we move from a call for proposals to being to the stage where we are talking about an MOU, or Memorandum of Understanding? So we've talked about putting out the call for proposals, communicating the program expectations, what we're looking for to people in our campus community to get them involved in the publishing program. Those authors responded based on their understanding of what we were looking for. We selected projects based upon our perceived capacity and shared understanding with the author, and now it's time we really want to clarify things using a memorandum of understanding as that communication tool to kick off the whole publication process.
So a memorandum of understanding is a formal, although not necessarily legally binding way, to outline expectations from both parties. So as the author, what can they expect from us in terms of services and support? We in serving as a publisher, what do we expect from them in terms of formatting and deadline and resources and supplementals that are going to go into there? They can be as long or as short as you would like to have them be. I've seen memorandums of understanding that are 10 pages long. I've seen them that hardly take up half a page. So the great thing is there's lots of flexibility with MOUs to customize them to the specific needs of your publishing program.
So why have an MOU? I really like these because I feel like they set the tone for collaboration. We're both excited to partner together as the author and the publisher. Now let's sit down and outline what we want to achieve and how we are going to achieve it. Another thing I like, that it really formally establishes expectations for everybody involved. So I've been involved in publishing situations where I don't know how wires got crossed, but they kind of did.
So for example, we one time had a faculty member here who was really excited to be part of our open textbook publishing program. We reviewed the proposal, it seemed like a great fit. We got to the point where we were ready to accept it and I was talking about the MOU and one of the areas was talking about compensation, and in saying that we have a grant that goes along with this and that would be given to the faculty member to use in these certain ways, but that there was no remuneration beyond that. And the faculty member was like, "Wait, what about my royalties?" And we were like, "Oh, well this is open publishing, there are no royalties. It's put out there for free." And they hadn't necessarily realized that.
And it really made us reflect on what were we trying to communicate out when we were doing our call for proposals that led to that confusion and how could we better address things in the future to make sure they understand what we meant by providing that one time grant and then what might come after that. But without having sat down to talk through that MOU at that time, we could have gotten all the way through the publication process and then there was this expectation from them of receiving royalties that didn't come to fruition and that could have caused a lot of frustration. So it's really great for kind of formally laying out things.
And then when there's confusion, or maybe one side or the other, it can be either one is not living up to expectations it gives you a document to go back to and say, "Okay, what might we need to change here in order to meet the goals of what we're trying to achieve?" Or sometimes this was presented to us for a publication this way, in the MOU we stated that we need it this way. So putting that work back on them to go in and submit it in the format needed. So lots of useful things can come about as a result of using an MOU for your publishing program.
So there's a few things you need to consider. The first off is who is the agreement going to be between? So very obviously it is going to be between those creating the OER, whether it is one author or multiple authors. One thing when there's multiple authors, sometimes people have what we call a corresponding author. So if we have a project that's going to have five authors, the corresponding author, we send communications to them, they share it with the other authors, bring back the group decision and communicate it back to us.
There's some pros and cons with this model. I think the biggest pro is everybody's busy and if you're trying to get responses from five people, that can be a little bit harder as versus trying to get a response from one person. Sometimes I've seen authors talk ahead of time, if it's something big like adding or removing a chapter or moving something around, we all want to have input on it, but if it's just editing and wordsmithing and kind of basic things like that, the corresponding author can make the decisions in those situations. So it can facilitate communication in moving the project forward. The only times corresponding authors can sometimes be a little bit of a hangup is if you get to the point where the corresponding author isn't corresponding with you for some reason or they're making decisions or calls about the project that are outside what the group empowered them to do.
I will say when it comes to MOUs, if we are working with a group of authors, we require that all the authors be there for the discussion. We all sign the MOU together, we make sure we answer all of those questions ahead of time so they understand what that communication structure will be with the author. So that's on the one end, the author or the authors of the project.
On the other end is who is actually doing the publishing support. Sometimes that is the library, sometimes maybe it's a division or a specific department in the library or sometimes it's the academic institution itself. So here at Miami University, the MOU is kind of made on behalf of Miami University even though I am the one primarily supporting the publishing program. And the reason we do that is we make sure any rights or anything we're empowered to do with the MOU is tied more to the institution than one person or one role.
And the reason for that is people can move on. Maybe they win the lottery, maybe they decide to retire or leave the job or something, and if that project is just connected to my name, that can then cause some issues. Even having it tied to a specific role, people's job titles or roles can change. They might move into a new role and that's empty. So here at Miami University we choose to do it between the institution and the authors rather than any one person or role and the authors. That again, is completely up to you and your institution. I have seen libraries do it different ways. Sometimes it's between the library and the authors. Sometimes it's between the publishing department and the authors. Sometimes it's the institution. Again, here you can think about what two parties or what groups of parties is this going to be between and customize that to your institution.
Next you want to think about what is actually in that memorandum of understanding. And usually you're going to see two main groups. Number one, what are we expecting the authors to deliver? If we're talking about an open textbook, the text, that's probably going to include images, charts, figures. One big thing we always highlight in our memorandums of understanding is clearing permissions.
So when you are reusing third party content, under what context are you using that? If you are reusing images or charts or graphs, do we want those to be all Creative Commons license? If we are going to empower authors to reuse images, charts, graphs, things like that under user rights found in the law like fair use, to what extent do we want them making those decisions under, do we have the ability as a publisher to maybe override a decision that we don't necessarily agree with? Or if something is not made available under an open license, to what extent are they responsible going and obtaining permission from the rights holder to use that in the work? So very clearly outlining from the author, here is what we expect to get from you, as the project, your deliverables.
In terms of the institution, we outline here is a publishing support we are going to provide. Maybe in terms of finding contributors, so we have a student employee who is very skilled at graphic design and art and we are able to employ them to help support people publishing open educational resources by creating some of that artwork for them, so noting that that's a contribution. Maybe we say, as the publisher, "We're going to be willing to go out and find reviewers for your work, will you focus on writing it" We'll outline to what extent will we provide copying services, layout services, who's going to be doing those, whether we're doing those in-house or whether we're contracting with a third party like Scribe. And then the actual publication itself. What are our plans in terms of where this will live and when we hope to have that project published? So outlining what the author is delivering and then us as a publishing program, what that author or authors can expect from us.
What is your timeline? This is a big one. And I will say I helped founded and was an editor of a journal for 10 years. I recently completed a book that was published that took me almost five years. And if there's one thing I've learned being on both sides of the publication process as the editor and the author is that however long you think it's going to take you, double that, add on a few months and that might actually be more of a true reflection of the timeline.
Now I have some authors that have hit their timelines on the head every single time, in fact have turned things in early. But it's mostly been my experience, myself included, that life happens, that we set aside a week to work on a project, but then we got busy with something else at work that was assigned to us. We have ideas of when we will work on a project but then a family member gets sick or we're not feeling well or something else happens that this project has shifted to the back burner for a little while. What I tell authors is, "Let's set some initial dates for what we want to have this published. What are your goals for submitting things? But as we all know, life happens. If anything changes, talk to me. That's the biggest thing, is just let me know." Because if I know what's going on, then we can be flexible and shift those dates around as needed.
Where we run into the biggest need to shift dates is if we're contracting with a third party like Scribe and we tell them, "We want to utilize your copy editing services and we will deliver this manuscript in December." They might be planning on that project in December and if we want to shift it to February, that might mean shifting around of some of their other projects or they've booked other things for February but they can't get it till March. So us staying in communication with third party vendors we might work with.
So I think initially it's a really good idea to set up the due date of the deliverables from the author but realize that might be flexible and telling the author the exact same thing back, especially for things that we might be doing in-house like layout, that it's kind of a party of one with a little bit of support working on this here at Miami University. And while I set aside and focus time for this project, things can happen with me personally or other projects or things can come up at work and if my timelines are going to change in terms of getting things back to you, I will let you know. So I will say the dates are probably the thing that I have seen most often revisited as part of the memorandum of understanding.
Before we go into how materials will be submitted, Heather, do we have any questions on anything I've talked about so far?
Heather: Yes, we do. Carla, there's a question from Michael. He asks, "How do you include making content accessible in the MOU? Is this a faculty responsibility or the institution's?"
Carla: It is a little bit of both. So what we put forward is guides and best practices for our faculty members, and fortunately here at Miami University we have lots of resources to help them with that. So how do we want you designing your headings, so we know what is a title, a first, second, third level heading, things like that. One of the big things we really impress upon our authors is alternate text. So if you see this image here I have on the slide, I personally could come up with alternate text for this, but especially for a chart or a graph, we really want the author deciding what do they want communicated in that alternate text to put forward for the readers. So we generally in our style guide have a standard of these are the things you need to be doing for accessibility. And we very often hold them to a base level of things.
Like headings, whether they use the Microsoft Office headings or they designate the headings in some other way, we just need to know what those are and alternate texts tend to be the big ones. Beyond that, we do a lot of the accessibility stuff in the PDF, the final document on the backend in terms of publishing. But it's gotten to a point where there is so much work and setting a document up to be highly accessible that if the author's not doing the things on their end, we're going to keep sending that back. Bee Campus has a really great guide on accessibility and open educational resources and I encourage anybody to take a look at that. That's one of the things we very often direct our authors to think about or to engage with or to use as a resource when they're thinking about the accessibility of their document. Let me know if that helps.
And do we have any other questions, Heather?
Heather: I'm not seeing any more at this time.
Carla: Okay, I'll keep going on, but please hop in with questions when you have them, at any time. So another key thing is how will these materials being submitted, what do we need to get from the faculty author in order to move forward with publication on our end? This includes the manuscript file format. We require that they submit in Word, I know some faculty are more comfortable with some other programs, but it's easiest on our end if we're working from a Word document. If that's not the best fit for them, then that's completely fine. We can't bring them into our publishing program at this time, but so far we've had nobody turn us down because we've required word.
One of our big things is the requirement for graphics and images. So what resolution do we require those at? What size do we want those at? Because that's important for the finishing of the final documents. And then of course citations. And I say this with a sigh, because citations tend to be a struggling point in a couple different areas. Number one, things coming to us without a proper citation. So you have an image like this, which you know that the instructor didn't create, but we don't have a citation on it from where it came from or especially if it's a Creative Commons image, the citation we want to include in order to be in compliance with the work. I'm really big on references, so as I'm going through in proofreading, if I see an author's name, I'm going to the references and highlighting that off so that's included in there. And inevitably in the manuscript there will be resources cited that aren't in the bibliography or there's resources in the bibliography that I'm then not finding in the work itself. So communicating with the author, kind of what got lost here.
So one of the things we talk about upfront is our required citation formats and then just having a very in-depth conversation with them upfront that yes, sometimes it is a pain to stay on top of citations as you're writing, but doing so at the forefront as soon as you cite a document in the work, making sure you go instantly put that in the bibliography or when you're finding third party works, making sure you're capturing the information from where that comes from, it's going to save tons of time down the road in trying to go back and find those again and incorporate them in. My job's a lot easier when there's a citation in the bibliography that is not in the OER itself as versus a citation that's in the text of the OER or under an image or graphic that is not in the bibliography.
Copyright considerations, always my favorite part, and part of that is me being a copyright librarian, but I think this is one of the really exciting areas where we get to talk with them about the way licensing their work under a Creative Commons open license empowers them to retain the copyright in the work. So some of the questions are, is this being written by a single author? Are there multiple authors? If they're student authors, especially if those students are creating content as part of the class, do we need to have FERPA waivers or agreements, because that then is then considered an educational record to include that in the open educational resource.
Sometimes at institutions, OERs are classified as a work made for hire. So I'm going to pick on my colleagues here, say Amanda came to our publishing program and we're so excited to have the work and it's an exchange for the honorarium and publishing support that we're going to provide. We're going to call it a work made for hire so that the copyright is then retained by Miami University rather than Amanda. Now of course under the open license, Amanda is going to be empowered to reuse that in multiple ways. I know doing this is sometimes a little bit controversial, but one of the biggest benefits I will acknowledge is then if Amanda moves on to bigger and better things, we as the institution are empowered to reformat, do different things, bring in new authors, things like that with that work that we may have questions about otherwise depending on what Creative Commons license was chosen for that. So thinking about those authorship and rights holder considerations.
Certifications and indemnities. As far as MOUs go, I very often try to make sure that they are worded in plain language so they're easy for anybody who reads it to understand. And then we get to this part that says certifications and indemnities and people sound a little bit nervous, because they're big fancy legal words. Generally the certification, what I'm asking them to do is certify that the content I am presenting is mine is actually mine. I haven't plagiarized it or taken it from somewhere else and then indemnities that, in me saying this is my content, I'm indemnifying you from any liability that comes as a result of me not being truthful from that.
We also ask them to warrant that it doesn't contain any libelous materials, things like that. As the editor when you're reading through it you're almost always going to catch that if you are serving as the editor or the editor will, and then you can have a conversation with the author about maybe why they're including certain content in your concerns about it. But that is one of the more legally worded areas is the certifications and indemnities.
And then of course we have a section that talks about the open license, which one are you going to choose to attach to the work? Here at Miami University, we really encourage them to choose one of two licenses, either a CC BY, so a Creative Commons attribution license or a CC BY NC, a Creative Commons non-commercial license, just so that where it can't be reused for commercial purposes. Those are the two primary ones, we let the author choose from one of those two, which one they would like to assign.
Budget, we have another section in our MOUs discussing budget. And there's a couple of things that can go on in this particular area. Number one, what is the budget for the project? The budgets for our project I think have ranged from about $4 to about $10,000. It depends on the level of production they've needed, and very often it is a case by case conversation with the author or authors and how that money is going to be spent.
For the most part, it is almost always spent on production, on maybe hiring a graduate assistant to help create some of the content. Sometimes some of that is spent for permissions, works they wish to reuse that are not openly licensed and we don't feel fall within user rights like fair use. So outlining what types of expenses can be covered and can't be covered.
We have offered our faculty authors honorariums, but to a T, they have all said, "You know what, I'm not doing this for the money. Why don't we just put this back into the project?" But then if you are offering them an honorarium or a stipend, something you want to include in the MOU is how is that going to be paid out? Some institutions say, "We'll give you half upfront and we'll give you the other half when the work is published." Some institutions say, "We will give you the honorarium when the work is published, when it's finalized." That's something you can decide internally how you want to distribute those funds as well.
Something else you may want to include here is who is going to be paying people. So with the publication support we provide, generally, if there's any bills to pay, we have those come to the library and we pay them. I know at some institutions they just transfer the funds over to that particular author or author's department and then they are responsible for paying any bills out of that fund associated with those costs. So something to think about at your institution too, to include in the MOU, how are those payments going to be made?
And then contingency planning, issues almost always arise in publication, and that's just fine. And they very often arise on both ends. Life happens with the author, they're a little delayed in getting it in. They had hoped for permissions for a couple works, they weren't able to get those, so they need to recraft the chapter so they're a little delayed in getting that. On the publishing side, maybe another author is a little late in getting their manuscript in, so that delays you in getting their project started. Or maybe something happens at your institution, you have a water leak and the library's in chaos for a month and a half and that slows down production. So you can always go back and easily revise MOUs. In terms of citation style, they decide partway through, they want to use MLA instead of APA. Are you amenable to that? Okay, if so, we can reword that part.
Like I said earlier, changing the dates is the revisions I most often see. We do have language in our MOUs about canceling the contracts. And again, this can go both ways. We've had faculty who have the best of intentions in the world in getting these projects together, but then something happens. So for example, one of our authors was so excited about publishing their OER and then their department had left, and within one week they were made the department head and remained the interim department head for a year and a half. And they came to me and said, "Carla, it's such chaos right now. I'm so sorry, I don't have time for this project."
So we have language in our MOUs that basically says with 30 days notice, either side can cancel this agreement. And that's really kind of the only time we've pulled it out. And that was in a way a cancellation, but it was also, "Okay, we're just kind of sending this on the back burner. When you're ready to come back, we're excited to work with you again. We'll probably draw up a new MOU then based on any new practices we might have here as the library publisher or anything new you might want to see out of the project." But a cancellation clause has been nice to have in there for that reason.
Sometimes you'll have authors who just stop talking to you for whatever reason. It seems like to me, when I finally do get to have a conversation with them, it's almost always, "I was so behind in my project, I was so embarrassed, it was just hard for me to talk to you." So in that case, you can pull out the cancellation clause and say, "We've been corresponding for email for a while. It's been more than 30 days, I haven't heard back from you. At this point, as per our MOU, we're going to go ahead and cancel this project. If you would like to revive it at any time, please reach out to us so we can have a conversation about it." So that can be fortunate on both sides to have as a contingency in those extreme situations. Heather, are there any questions before I go on to drafting this document?
Heather: No, no more.
Carla: Okay, great.
Heather: Okay, thanks.
Carla: So as you start to draft your MOU one thing you want to be aware of in institution policies and procedures. I very often encourage folks to check with human resources at your institution or your legal counsel on this. So for example, if authors at your institution are unionized, there may be requirements in their union contract that this is seeing work upon normal duties and there's special considerations for compensation, how much time they can spend on it, things like that. And you certainly don't want to be in violation of that contract. So human resources can help make you aware of some of those requirements. Talking with legal counsel very often they'll just kind of be interested in what are you doing? Is there any language as the institution we might want to see in there, for example, in terms of if the institutional trademarks or logos or anything like that is going to be used. So having conversations with HR, legal counsel and administrators or your institution about this MOU you're putting together and their advice on anything they might want to see in it.
You can start drafting yours from the ground up or you can swipe somebody else's. I very much encourage you to swipe somebody else's, that's kind of what we did here at Miami University. There are some great examples shared in the publishing curriculum. And then also what we did is we took a look at my book contract and we're like, "Wow, looking in here, there's some language we actually like." And part of that was in terms of revisions. So if there comes a time where the work needs to be revised, that we would approach the original authors or authors first, but if they declined to do those revisions that we as a publisher would be then empowered to go seek other people to do those revisions. So we stole a little language from that as well that we like to work into our MOU.
So I think for most people it ends up being a little bit of both. Go take a look at those MOUs that are available in the publishing curriculum, pull pieces and parts from them that you think would be good for your institution and then maybe add in your own institutional language or practices to be reflected in that document.
Tips and recommendations. I already said this a little bit, but wherever possible use plain language. I've been working with US copyright law in contracts for almost two decades now, and I still even get a headache sometime trying to wade through the legalese. Chances are your authors, especially if they're in the humanities or if they're in the sciences, have never really approached this type of language before. And we really want them to understand what we are trying to communicate, both in terms of what we can offer and our expectations from them.
Organize the document logically, whatever that logic might look like to your institution. Very often what we do here at Miami University is the author expectations, the publisher expectations, timelines, budget, and then contingencies, and that's where we put, on the off chance something goes wrong, that we have 30 days to cancel.
The key areas you need addressed could be discussed or individualized to each MOU. So for example, we had the great question earlier about accessibility, that is so key to work into these open documents. A resource like a math textbook is going to have much greater accessibility considerations than maybe just a straightforward textbook. So what do you need from them in terms of accessibility or formatting to make sure you are effectively constructing that OER with the special needs. So making sure you address that in there as well for each project.
So here at Miami University, we inform them early on that we have an MOU that they will sign once they are accepted, we make that MOU available to them as part of the request for proposals so they can ask any questions or understand what our expectations are, so if they don't feel they can meet any of them or if they want to negotiate some of them, we can be doing that ahead of time. Something I do is I schedule a meeting with the author or authors and go through that MOU line by line. And the reason I do that is I never want anybody putting their name on a document that they don't thoroughly understand what they are agreeing to. So we go through each section, I ask if they have any questions, they can ask questions of me. And that's also a great place for, okay, let's modify this part a little bit, or let's change this part a little bit to suit the needs of the specific project just to make sure it's a well-informed document that we have a good chance of both sides meeting their responsibilities under it.
And then of course, being available to answer questions at any time. I always tell any author I'm collaborating with, communication is number one, you can't check in too often. Anytime you have a question about, "I found this and it seems to have an open license on it, but I have a question about the authorship. Do you mind taking a look at it?" Or in terms of citation, "How do I cite this particular work?" Or, "I've run into a problem, I've just been assigned another class that's going to slow down my work this week, can we take a look at my due dates and adjust accordingly?" Just being available to answer those questions about the MOU and the information contained in it.
Communicate, communicate, communicate on both ends. I know some publishing programs have monthly check-ins, weekly check-ins. I've been pretty fortunate that most of my faculty and I, we have good communication kind of on different levels or different timelines for each project, but for the most part we've been in a pretty good place about what's going on. Every now and then a month might go by and I haven't heard from somebody I normally hear from every two weeks, so I'll just dash them off a quick email, how is everything going? Is there anything I can help with? So keeping those lines open. Using the MOU as a guide for those check-ins. So the date was May 15th. Let's take a look and see what we had agreed upon due on May 15th. Do you feel like you're still on track to meet that? Do you think you need some additional time? If so, what does that look like?
When questions come up, when problems pop up, what in the MOU can be negotiated and what cannot? So maybe the budget cannot be renegotiated. Your institution set aside a specific amount of funds and this is what you've assigned to each project and you don't have any wiggle room in that budget. If they need a little bit more than that for some aspect of their project, "Well, unfortunately at this time, we as a publisher can't support that." "Can your department kick in some funds? Can we look at an alternate option?" So what is non-negotiable as versus what might be negotiable, like the citation format or like the dates. Be flexible where you can, because putting together an open educational resource, it's a project on both sides, but make it very clear upfront, here are the things we don't have any flexibility on.
So I think that's most of what I have. I've tried to work in some examples that I've encountered in supporting these programs. I welcome any questions you might have on all the content I've shared, or just about MOUs in general, or if you've had experience with MOUs. I would love to hear what those have been like for you.
Heather: Okay. I just want to say thank you again, Carla, for sharing your recommendations and expertise with us. So at this time, if you'd like to put any questions or comments in chat, please do. You can also raise your hand and I'll call on you and you can unmute your mic and share that way. Okay, here's one from Colleen. She says, "Thank you, Carla. Do you recommend requiring A MOU for OER adaptations in addition to new creations?"
Carla: Sorry, I'm muted. I would say that's up to each institution. So we have a program, let me make sure I have this straight, the Alternate Textbook Program, where we are putting together an OER from a class, really, they're not writing a lot of content, they're just pulling from different sources. In that situation, we don't require an MOU, more of a timeline. What content are you getting? How can I make sure the content we're making available is accessible? Things like that.
We focus more on MOUs for the OER creation because that's just such a huge project and we kind of do need certain things to fall in line because we are such a small shop in supporting those. But I could see an MOU from both sides. The one for adaptation could certainly be much shorter because they're already starting with a lot of that content ready-made. So what is their timeline for adapting that? Where might they need a librarians help to bring in some supplemental content that they're having trouble finding. So if you're going to have one there, I could see it being much simpler than a publication one.
Heather: Karen posted, "Carla mentioned, you can find MOU templates in the Pub101 curriculum," and Karen's posted the link to that curriculum in that spot.
Carla: Thank you, Karen.
Heather: I have a question. I was wondering, and this could be asked of the group as well as Carla, who holds the copyright to faculty and staff writing at your university? Do faculty need to ask the legal office for permission to put an open license on their writing or can they just go ahead and do it?
Carla: This is such a great question, and the answer is it depends. So I will say today, at the vast majority of institutions of higher education, normally when we think about faculty creations, you've been hired to teach a class, so you create PowerPoint presentations, study guides, tests, things like that, it would certainly fall within the work made for hire category of US copyright law. But most institutions of higher education have a campus intellectual property policy that for teaching faculty say, this is kind of an exception, that even though you are creating those in a work made for hire situation, you retain the copyright in those, although the institution may reserve the right to have a copy of your syllabus for accreditation or to have access to your teaching materials if you leave partway through the semester and they need somebody else to pick up teaching.
I have heard that there are a few institutions of higher education out there that do claim things as work made for hire. Now that's for regular faculty teaching and instruction. Open educational resources can kind of be their creation of a project on and above that. Here at Miami University, we still consider that a creation of faculty scholarship, and we say the copyright in that rests with the faculty member, although they give Miami University an exclusive worldwide perpetual and irrevocable license to reuse the content in any manner worldwide, blah, blah, blah. You can see how often I do this.
Heather: That's good to know.
Carla: I would say start by checking your campus's intellectual property policy and see if the answer lies there. If it does not, that is definitely one of the questions I would reach out to legal counsel about, how are we going to classify this, as faculty scholarship or as a work made for hire situation?
And that's also, especially when money is evolved, a good conversation to have ahead of time. I had a faculty member a while back who was asked by their department head to create an online class for lower level courses that any instructor could teach. She created the syllabus, she created all the lessons, she created all this content, and then the department said, "Okay, thanks. This belongs to the department now." And she's like, "Whoa, wait a minute. What? No, I created this. This is mine." And he said, "No, I paid you, this is mine." And because there was no agreement ahead of time, I very unfortunately got drawn into the middle of this with our legal counsel to figure out who owned the content. So having that conversation ahead of time can be really great to help avoid those frustrating situations.
Heather: Okay. Angelique Carson says, "Swiping from other MOUs provided a huge benefit when researching other program's infrastructure in building our pilot program. We found a wealth of items we needed to consider." And Haley says, "We, IU, encourage fellows in our projects to CC license their works since they retain copyright. We only ask for a non-exclusive license for preservation." And then Amanda said, "At Ohio State, faculty own their IP, Intellectual Property, and can license staff counts as work for hire, so we cannot. The university owns the decision about licensing." I just found that interesting because one of the law librarians mentioned something about at CSU faculty have to ask legal to put a Creative Commons license on their work. And I'm not sure how accurate that is, but it just seems like an extra step. But yeah, I'm just curious.
Carla: So it can kind of go both ways. So I'm a faculty librarian, so something like this PowerPoint presentation or a book chapter I might write, there's no question that I retain the copyright in that as a faculty member under our campus intellectual property policy. Now for our publishing program, say I create a publication manual, now maybe I'm doing that more within the scope of my job rather than faculty creative work and scholarship. So it could be that manual that I've created is considered a work made for hire. And in that situation, I could absolutely see, okay, since the university owns a copyright in that, they want me to go to legal counsel for that document to put an open license on it. But yeah, I would say take a look at the intellectual property policy at Cleveland State and there might be a little bit more clarity to find there when that open license is required, or permission for the open license is required, I guess I should say.
Heather: Yeah, it was a eye-opener for me. Do we have any more questions or anything anybody'd like to share? Okay, I will be respectful of your time. I just want to say thank you again to Carla for talking with us today, and thank you all for joining us to learn more about open textbook publishing. We hope that as we continue to share available resources and recommendations, one of your key takeaways is the sense that you are not alone in figuring out how to support open textbook authors. Remember that if you have more questions about today's session or would like to chat with others about it, you can do so in our class notes, which I'll put a link to in chat. We'll take a look at these notes and questions and comment there. And just as a reminder, next Thursday, May 18th, we'll have a session on working with authors presented by Abby Elder. We hope you can join us then. And please everyone, have a good rest of your day.
Carla: Thank you everybody, have a good one.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:16:25 Heather Caprette: The link to Pub 101 Orientation document for Spring 2023 is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RVYw2ace_L42x8vxo0nGlJC6rHVvLDzYKeBR4RMdbi4/edit#heading=h.d89ulxay3q4x
00:17:30 Heather Caprette: The link to YouTube Pub101 Spring 2023 Playlist is https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWRE6ioG4vdYaAD97KKJiu-XZ08NpN6oq. The link to our Pub 101 Canvas curriculum is https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173
00:27:36 Michael Porterfield: How do you include making content accessible in the MOU? Is this a faculty responsibility or institution?
00:31:13 Michael Porterfield: Reacted to "How do you include m..." with 👍
00:51:04 Colleen Deel: Thank you, Carla! Do you recommend requiring a MOU for OER adaptations in addition to new creations?
00:52:29 Karen Lauritsen: Carla mentioned you can find MOU templates in the Pub101 curriculum. Here’s the link: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173/pages/author-agreements-mous-and-contracts?module_item_id=9770870
00:53:05 Angelique Carson: “Swiping” from other MOUs provided a huge benefit when researching other programs’ infrastructure and building our pilot program. We found of wealth of items we needed to consider!
00:54:26 Haley Norris: We (IU) encourage fellows in our projects to CC license their works since they retain copyright. We only ask for a non exclusive license for preservation.
00:54:27 Amanda Larson: At Ohio State - Faculty own their IP. Can license. Staff counts as work for hire - so we cannot. University owns the decision about licensing.
00:59:06 Heather Caprette: The link to our Class Notes is https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q_mvThSTMJfxSatX4XjwcDrjZf44_udVWtShkIhaF2g/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
00:59:25 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you, Carla! Great to hear from you ☺️
00:17:30 Heather Caprette: The link to YouTube Pub101 Spring 2023 Playlist is https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWRE6ioG4vdYaAD97KKJiu-XZ08NpN6oq. The link to our Pub 101 Canvas curriculum is https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173
00:27:36 Michael Porterfield: How do you include making content accessible in the MOU? Is this a faculty responsibility or institution?
00:31:13 Michael Porterfield: Reacted to "How do you include m..." with 👍
00:51:04 Colleen Deel: Thank you, Carla! Do you recommend requiring a MOU for OER adaptations in addition to new creations?
00:52:29 Karen Lauritsen: Carla mentioned you can find MOU templates in the Pub101 curriculum. Here’s the link: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173/pages/author-agreements-mous-and-contracts?module_item_id=9770870
00:53:05 Angelique Carson: “Swiping” from other MOUs provided a huge benefit when researching other programs’ infrastructure and building our pilot program. We found of wealth of items we needed to consider!
00:54:26 Haley Norris: We (IU) encourage fellows in our projects to CC license their works since they retain copyright. We only ask for a non exclusive license for preservation.
00:54:27 Amanda Larson: At Ohio State - Faculty own their IP. Can license. Staff counts as work for hire - so we cannot. University owns the decision about licensing.
00:59:06 Heather Caprette: The link to our Class Notes is https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q_mvThSTMJfxSatX4XjwcDrjZf44_udVWtShkIhaF2g/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
00:59:25 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you, Carla! Great to hear from you ☺️
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