With innovating technology and digital development, it is essential that academic researchers and students require content that are open licensed, as opposed to claiming the “fair use” of copyrighted content or needing to request permission from copyright owners. Copyright is a tremendously complicated topic, both educational and legal. Reproducing, reusing or even quoting other people’s work in significant portions without the permission of copyright owner or including statement of copyright obtained, will lead to grave consequences under institution policies and the Canadian Copyright Act.
For strictly educational purposes in some countries for specific use, there exists a clause of “fair use” or “fair dealing”, however this does not mean the copyright is relaxed or waived. Fortunately, Open Educational Resources (OERs) exist to partially resolve the lack of open materials for academia. They grant the researchers and students unrestricted access for educational purposes, and void of access restrictions such as fees or an institutional account. However, this does not great the researcher any reuse rights without express permission from the author. The researcher or student still must use limited short quotations or to paraphrase from the article, both with citation styles such as APA 7.
Some open licenses do allow reuse in any kind such as public domain and CC0 content, while others have restrictions such as non-commercial use, must attribute author and/or cannot create derivative work. And the “share-alike” is rather confusing but it is equivalent to the so called “libre” or “copyleft”, but still under certain licence. Nothing comes completely libre and free in today’s world. Authors’ hard works must not be undermined or use in an unauthorised way, which is definitely not what the authors and publishers would like to see.
Typical challenges for OER and open education include misuse and abuse of the licence for the purpose of mass distribution and systematic downloads and duplications, which is strictly prohibited both under the copyright policies of libraries, institutions and laws. The consequences can range from written warning, suspension to permanent expulsion from the institution and it sometimes also comes with legal jeopardy and if it is criminal in nature, prison sentences.
In my view, it is paramount to set up appropriate access controls, while benefiting students and researchers, but not be overly restrictive such as a hard paywall to all users. A solution would be to allow more university users to access materials off campus but of course with certain conditions. There is no absolute freedom without a cost. Publishers and authors need to benefit in some kind of way, even if it is not monetary, they of course need to be attributed, and property cited in other academic work which references their work.
To conclude, open learning and pedagogy should be beneficial to all parties involved including authors, publishers, researchers, educators and students. It should not be abused or misused in an illegal or detrimental way and all parties should work together to maintain an open access, but this “openness” definitely is not excuses or loopholes for illegal and activities that violate the academic institutions’ policies.