Works Open Access Policy

Approved by the PALNI Board February 26, 2021

Introduction

The following policy is designed to provide guidance and structure around copyright and licensing of PALNI’s shareable outputs. It should ensure continued access to PALNI works, encourage sharing of PALNI ideas, and to prevent restriction of any content created within PALNI structures.

Policy

PALNI is the copyright holder of all content created by PALNI, its employees, and contributors from supported institutions within the Statement of Work for PALNI groups. Shareable PALNI works should be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY) and attributed to the author(s) and PALNI unless otherwise marked.

What is Shareable Content?

PALNI is a non-profit organization, creating works collaboratively across its many supported institutions. Sharing is the foundation upon which PALNI operates, and creating output to share with the consortial, academic, and library communities is one of PALNI’s ideals. We want others to know what we are doing and to encourage them to use our resources when feasible.

A PALNI work should be considered shareable when:

Authors of the material agree that it is complete and ready to be shared
It does not contain confidential/private information
Third-party content is used with permission and is properly marked if appropriate

This includes, but is not limited to: writings, images, presentations, and documentation that relates to the services of PALNI and its groups, created using tools, equipment, facilities or other resources of PALNI. Some examples of shareable content:

Conference presentations representing PALNI groups
Literature reviews and project research created for advisory groups
Group outputs, such as LibGuides and toolkits
Policies created by PALNI administration teams
Papers or reports of task force findings
Some minutes, recordings, and slides from PALNI meetings

There are some exceptions below for PALNI works that are not shareable and/or subject to this policy.

Also, the following are neither owned nor copyrighted by PALNI, and are not subject to this policy:

Original work completed outside of PALNI group structures
Data or other material entered into PALNI applications/databases, such as bibliographic records, works of scholarship, or digital cultural heritage content
Personal reflections, questions, or notes posted to the PALNI Community or Google drive

What is CC-BY?

Creative Commons is an organization that provides several licenses to copyright holders in order to grant different rights to users without requiring them to seek permission. CC-BY is the license that allows users to share and adapt a work for any purpose, provided appropriate credit is given (but not in a way that implies endorsement). This is considered a free culture license. It is, by nature, very open and encourages sharing. It does not relinquish ownership or copyright. Rather, it simply gives users automatic and express permission to use, share, and adapt licensed material.

Applying the License

CC-BY licensing language and icons should be applied to PALNI’s shareable outputs by copying and pasting directly onto the work (usually at the end), embedding in the HTML of a webpage (usually at the bottom), or selecting the CC-BY option when uploading content to a number of online platforms (Vimeo, Flickr, IRs, etc.).

To Copy and Paste:

Suggested Text:

[Title of work] by [Author(s) name & PALNI Group] is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License unless marked otherwise. PALNI’s logo and branding template are not covered by this license, and all rights to such material are reserved. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.palni.org/contact/.

Icons:

Normal- Compact-

To Embed:

HTML code for normal icon and text:

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png" /></a> [Title of work] by [Author(s) name & PALNI] is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a>. PALNI’s logo and branding template are not covered by this license. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at <a xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="http://www.palni.org/contact_us/" rel="cc:morePermissions">http://www.palni.org/contact_us/</a>.

HTML code for compact icon and text:

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/80x15.png" /></a> [Title of work] by [Author(s) name & PALNI] is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a>. PALNI’s logo and branding template are not covered by this license. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at <a xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="http://www.palni.org/contact_us/" rel="cc:morePermissions">http://www.palni.org/contact_us/</a>.

Suggested Attribution

The CC-BY license requires that users give credit to the creator/owner of the content. The following text is an example of how users can properly cite PALNI content. This suggestion may be appended to the license (see the bottom of this page for an example). For more information, see Creative Commons best practices for attribution.

How to attribute this source:

[Title of work, hyperlinked to source] by [Author(s) name & PALNI] is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License / [Any modifications made].

Exceptions

Confidential Content

The policy to use CC-BY is not applicable to confidential or sensitive non-public information that is not meant to be shared (board minutes, financial information, vendor data, content under contractual restrictions, recordings in which privacy is assumed, etc.). However, efforts should be made to only deem content as confidential when necessary, and to attempt to negotiate out of confidentiality clauses when possible.

Special Circumstances

The policy is modifiable for special circumstances, such as the following:

Publication in repositories or journals requiring another type of license, although attempts should be made to keep PALNI’s outputs open
Software or code. See Creative Commons FAQ for more information.

In place of CC-BY, efforts should be made to select another open license available from Creative Commons (or equivalent) to impose additional restrictions above the requirement for attribution. In the case that a suitable CC license cannot be applied, a statement explicitly stating which uses are allowed (if any) should be attached to a PALNI work. Efforts should be made to negotiate out of any requirement to transfer copyrights during publication. As PALNI is the copyright holder, the PALNI Executive Committee would need to sign off on any such transfer.

Corporate Identity

PALNI’s corporate identity materials (logos, branding templates, etc.) are not subject to this policy as stated in the suggested text. This is in order to avoid others using PALNI’s name as their own or implying PALNI’s endorsement. You may still apply the CC-BY license when a work contains corporate identity elements, but explicit instructions for treatment of that material is required, i.e., “PALNI’s logos and branding template are not covered by this license, and all rights to such material are reserved.” For more information see Creative Commons FAQ here and here.

Third Party Content

The CC-BY license can only grant rights to material that the copyright holder has. You may still apply the CC-BY license when a work contains third-party content, but that content needs to be used with permission and properly marked. In order to be lawful and respectful, all third-party content needs to be marked and attributed (even if the item is in the public domain or a fair-use case is being made) in PALNI works. See Creative Commons Marking third party content for more information.

Photography/Video Considerations

At PALNI gatherings where photography and/or video is planned, attendees should be notified that photographs/video will be taken with the intent to share via the PALNI website, social media, press releases, etc. Attendees may opt-out of photography/video by making their preferences known to the photographer.

In order to protect the publicity, privacy, and personality rights of persons in PALNI images, photographs of people are not subject to the policy to use CC-BY, and they need to be marked as such. While PALNI may still share the images, all rights to the images will be reserved in order to limit unintended reuse (i.e., a Creative Commons license is not automatically applied). See Creative Commons FAQ for more information about this.

When PALNI images of people are used within material shared under CC-BY, that content should be marked “© PALNI. All rights reserved.” While not as explicit, another option would be to include that stipulation at the end of the material as part of the license statement. For example: “All rights reserved to images of conference attendees.” This method would make sense where it is not possible to mark the content in-line, such as in a video.

Press Releases

PALNI press releases will include PALNI’s corporate identity and may contain images of people. Press releases are designed to be distributed and reproduced widely, so special permission must be granted for this specific case. The following statement should be attached to press releases to ensure that PALNI’s images remain attached to the release and not reproduced for any other reason.

PALNI retains copyright to text and images in its press releases. You are hereby granted a non-exclusive limited license to use and/or reproduce this press release text and images for any legitimate media purpose, provided that you reference PALNI as the source and do not make modifications.

For more information, please contact Amanda Hurford, PALNI Scholarly Communications Director at amanda@palni.edu.

PALNI Works Open Access Policy by Amanda Hurford and PALNI is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License unless marked otherwise. PALNI’s logo and branding template are not covered by this license. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.palni.org/contact_us/.

How to attribute this work:
PALNI Works Open Access Policy by Amanda Hurford and PALNI is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License / [Any modifications made].