 Welcome to Seeking Permission for Open Educational Resource Repositories, presented by UBC Library and Copyright at UBC. Seeking Permission is the fourth in a series of five videos. The purpose of this video is to introduce you to the process of obtaining copyright clearance for copyrighted materials that you would like to include in your Open Educational Resource Repository. In the slides that follow, we will discuss, one, when you need to seek permission to include a resource in your repository, two, how you can go about obtaining permission from copyright holders, three, what you should include in any permission request, and four, what to do if you are unable to get permission. Seeking permission to reproduce another person's work is a common practice in publishing and may prove necessary during the creation of your Open Educational Resource Repository. In general, you will need to seek permission for any materials that you wish to include that are not available to you via the following. One, you are the sole copyright holder. Obviously, you do not need to seek permission from yourself to use your own work. This becomes complicated if you have signed your copyright away to a publisher, have created a work in which there is a joint authorship, or if you have included others' work in your work. If you would like to learn more about the complications here, please refer to the self-created content presentation. Two, you don't need to seek permission for materials that have been openly licensed for reuse. The purpose of assigning an open license to a work is to provide advanced permission for users to reuse that work and avoid the permission seeking process. So long as the use you intend to make of the work is covered by the terms of the license, you will not need to seek additional permission. If you would like to learn more about open licenses, please refer to the openly licensed materials presentation. Three, finally, you do not need to seek permission for materials that are in the public domain, whether due to the fact that the term of copyright has expired, or the creator has bequeathed their work into the public domain, usually by affixing a Creative Commons zero license to the work. If you have to seek permission for a resource that you hope to include in your repository, the first step is to determine who holds the copyright. Although not usually a difficult task, this may require you to consider the work from a different perspective than you are used to. For example, the copyright in academic work, including published scholarly journal articles, is often held by the publisher and not the author. Just being the case, you would need to approach the publisher of the work in order to obtain permissions. When trying to determine copyright, you should consider the following. Firstly, you should ask yourself if what you want to borrow is original to the publication or place you found the item. For example, UBC may have permission to reproduce a news article on their website, but if you want to include this news article in your repository, you would need to contact the publisher of the original article and not UBC, which merely has permission to display that article. If you believe that the item belongs to a third party, you will have to investigate who that third party is. Usually, third-party material will be identified as such by the inclusion of an attribution statement. Keep in mind that this attribution may be recorded in a footnote and note, list of figures, etc. Once you are confident that you have identified the original place of publication, you can contact the publisher with your permission request. In order to contact the rights holder, you will need to find their contact information. If the rights holder is a publisher or other commercial enterprise, they may have a specific office within their organization that grants permissions. If not, you may have luck contacting a corporate body's marketing or communications division. If you are searching for contact information on a website, the following search terms may be useful. Rights and permissions, permissions, copyright, reprints, contact us, legal, communications, or about us. If you cannot find any of these contacts on a website, you should not hesitate to call a business's general phone number. If you need to obtain permission from a rights holder, you will do so by obtaining, in writing, a positive response to your permission request. While this written agreement may be informal, as an email exchange will suffice, it is important that you provide a detailed description of exactly what material you wish to reuse and how you plan on distributing said material when you contact a rights holder. This is important because the amount of copying you wish to do, paired with the extent of distribution that you envision for the copied work, is likely to impact a rights holder's decision to grant you permission or not. For example, a copyright holder may have no problem granting you permission to make a physical copy of their work for research purposes, but might feel much differently about you making a digital copy of their work available on the internet where it is accessible to anyone. Because open educational resource repositories usually presume as wide a distribution as possible, it is essential that any written permission request disclose the extent and nature of the copying you hope to do. In order to protect yourself, it is best to retain a physical copy of any permission that you have received from copyright holders. This has been one in a series of interrelated videos on copyright and open educational resource repositories, presented by UBC Library and Copyright at UBC. For more information, please refer to the following UBC Copyright website resources.