Hi all

Thanks to John for his prompt prompt response.

Actually my answer is no.

I am afraid John's solution does not deal with the wealth of academic material, theses etc which have been produced before such universities start to understand the benefits you mention. As students already have the option of publishing their material on CC licenses (Students are not employees), they do not need to universities to provide such an option.

My point is that Wikimedia UK is in a unique position to actually do something to benefit how the community works as regards OTRS, of which the benefit I have mentioned is just an example.

If Wikimedia UK does not want to do this, then perhaps we could have a policy decision from the organisation to put us in the picture.

Then we could explore doing this directly through the Foundation. I doubt there is much appetite for setting up some sort of Wikimedia UK 3.0 – at this moment in time.

I know from one or two discussions I have had that various people feel that Wikimedia Uk has been experiencing some mission drift towards more general open knowledge advocacy and away from specific Wikimedia Community support. I feel this is an opportunity for the organisation to clarify where it's going.

Another issue I feel the charity could address is a generic clause for people to add to their wills releasing their copyrightable output under Creative Commons licenses. These could be generic, i.e. everything, or partitioned (for example: "all my photographs").

It would also be useful to have some phraseology so that people who own the copyright of someone who has died can release their material under a Creative Commons license. I feel this would make a significant impact in covering the gap between photos in particular taken by people whose copyright has lapsed and the contemporary period when people have started releasing their own photos on a CC license.

all the best

Fabian

aka Leutha

On 02 May 2017 at 14:05 John Lubbock <john.lubbock@wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:

Hi Fabian. Do you not think that this time consuming process of asking
authors individually could be substantially reduced by getting universities
to understand the benefits of Open Licenses and having them give their
students the option of publishing on CC licenses. Then the only work we
would have to do is to upload them.

John

On 2 May 2017 at 14:02, <leutha@fabiant.eu> wrote:

Hi all,

As copyright for a PhD thesis rests with the person who wrote it, it would
seem to be a secondary concern to worry over much about various
institutional arrangements. The Wikimedia movement has already developed
Wikisource <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page>, which is a
suitable repository for PhD theses, and I would say Masters thesis as well.
In fact all we need do is ask the people who own the copyright to upload a
pdf (or better a Dejavu file) to commons. Once they have done this - which
involves releasing reproduction rights as Creative Commons - then whether
they or others take the document through to becoming a completely validated
document.

The advantage of this is that we can then generate an annotated version
which includes hyperlinks to wikipedia pages which means we can create an
approach to reading which allows the reader to move fluidly between
wikipedia pages and upload PhD theses.

One of the problems I have encountered during my period as a Wikimedian in
Residence at MayDay Rooms, is in uploading an old MA thesis from Chris
Knight, <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Chris_Knight> currently a
professor of Anthropology. Getting his agreement, getting a pdf of his
thesis was quite easy. The problem was that having uploaded the file to
commons and having sent emails to the Commons OTRS
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:OTRS>, nothing happened for
several weeks. Indeed it was only thanks to the help of a Wikimedia at the
London Meet up who had access to the OTRS system, that the Commons
documentation could be updated.

The hold up is largely down to a shortage of people with OTRS access. When
I volunteered for this I was told I did not have enough experience. I was
not informed how such relevant experience constituted and how it might be
gained.

I raised this issue at the Education Summit
<https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/wikimedia-uk-education-summit-at-middlesex-university-tickets-30324750144> (sorry
for the eventbrite link, but I have been unable to find any on-wiki
documentation), and it would be interesting to know whether Wikimedia UK
would be interested in doing something about this?

In particular it would be useful if we could have some people already
active on OTRS to deliver a training session, so that we could have a whole
cohort trained up, and if they could thus show a sufficient level of
competence, could then go through the OTRS recruitment process.

OTRS respondents have a verified identity, but this identity is not made
public. This means that Wikimedia UK with its robust Data Protection
Policy <https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Data_Protection_Policy> constitutes
a suitable vehicle for organising such training, as this cannot be
organised by an informal group.

I would suggest that using staff time for this purpose should be
prioritised over activities which might have less direct impact on the
development of our movement.

all the best

Fabian

aka Leutha

On 02 May 2017 at 10:59 Richard Nevell <richard.nevell@wikimedia.org.uk>
wrote:

Open Research Exeter
<http://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/openaccess/databases/ orepolicies/#d.en.444179>
allows people to publish content under Creative Commons licences.

Aside from open licences, a lot of institutions are doing some good work
with making theses available online for free. As well as Exeter (where I'm
a PhD student), there's Edinburgh
<http://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/library-museum-gallery/finding- resources/library-databases/databases-subject-a-z/database-theses>
, Hull <https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/>, Oxford <https://ora.ox.ac.uk/>, and
White
Rose <http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/> which covers Leeds, Sheffield, and

York. Not everything is freely available - for example because some have
embargo periods - but it represents a large resource of free-to-access
information.

On 1 May 2017 at 14:34, Deryck Chan <deryckchan@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks John for the idea. I'm in a good position to participate on a
personal basis if something like this goes live.

I'm a PhD student at Cambridge University and I'm partially funded by
EPSRC which requires all their research publications to be open access. So
I will have the option to open-copyright my eventual PhD thesis, especially
if there's a movement and a repository for it.

Deryck

On 1 May 2017 at 14:22, John Levin <anterotesis@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear list,

The subject of publishing postgrad / PhD these under open licenses came
up via the W.UK twitter account a few days ago:

Wouldn't it be amazing if all postgrad/PhD students were given the option
to publish dissertations/theses on Open Licenses? #OpenKnowledge
https://twitter.com/wikimediauk/status/857618743924592640

I think there's two issues here: first, if, how and when postgrad theses
are published, then second, under what license.

For the first, there's been debates recently about embargoing publication
etc. Eg:
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/publishing-dissert
ation-online/51361
But that's another subject really.

For the second, I think there's no reason that prevents any thesis being
published under a free open license, save where there is use of copyrighted
materials. But I haven't found many unis stating this clearly.
Leeds is the only UK university I've found that overtly advocates CC
licenses:
https://library.leeds.ac.uk/info/371/copyright_for/294/copyr
ight_for_phds/4
But this is on the sole basis of a few hours googling.

I'm a PhD at Sussex ATM, so will be looking more closely into their
arrangements next year.

John

--
John Levin
http://www.anterotesis.com
http://twitter.com/anterotesis

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