 Well, hello, everyone, I'm Terry Green, I'll be moderating this session. And hopefully we're all here to find out the answer to is Creative Commons right for us. And I would like to welcome our presenters from Michigan Technological University, Library and Graduate School, Deborah Charlesworth, who's the Assistant Dean for Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs and Annalise Dahl, who is a Scholarly Communications and Repositories Librarian. And so we'll spend the next 20 minutes, hopefully getting an answer to our question. And if you have questions, please place them in the Q&A and we'll address them after the presentation. Thank you. Hi, everybody, and thanks for tuning into our presentation. So a little bit about Michigan Tech before we get started. Michigan Technological University is located in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and we are an R2 doctoral university with a STEM focus. And this fall semester, we have a total enrollment of just over 1200 graduate students. We approve and publish about 200 master's thesis, master's reports, and dissertations. Every academic year, and collectively, we refer to these as ETDRs. So in addition to publishing on ProQuest, students are required to submit their work to Digital Commons at Michigan Tech. This is the university's institutional repository. And this platform is going to be the focus of our presentation today. The Graduate School manages the entire approval and publication process for the ADRs on Digital Commons. However, as the repository administrator for the platform as a whole, I support the Graduate School with whatever their needs may be on behalf of the library. So where we were about a year ago is that we have approval process for dissertation, thesis, and reports that requires a paper form with physical signatures to let the Graduate School know that the student has made all of the required technical changes that the committee requires, and then work meets the satisfaction of the committee to be submitted for their degree requirements. It's sort of inefficient, obviously, with our online world that we're living in. And of course, everyone desires more processes online. They're easier. They can be done at convenient times for them instead of when our offices are open. And there is some human error potentially involved in that as we get pieces of paper and maybe misplace one of them or they're just mis-entered, data-entered into the system. And a year ago, again, our students have been self-submitting to Digital Commons for all of our ETDRs and to ProQuest for ETDs only. And students have been doing that in Digital Commons for roughly 10 years and for ProQuest about 15 or so. We do offer embargoes on both platforms. And one of our roles in the Graduate School is to ensure that the embargoes are consistent on both platforms. And then we also offer two access options. We do offer open and campus access. And of course, open access has a fee on ProQuest, but it is free on our Digital Commons IR. And if students select open access on RIR, we do not require that they also make it open access on ProQuest. And we have no licensing options for the digital work a year ago. So where we'd like to go is to have the approval process for the documents and the publication itself, the access option selected, fully managed on the Digital Commons platform. And then Annalisa is going to talk about Creative Commons. Yes. So just recently, we did add Creative Commons licensing options to the submission form that students fill out when they deposit their work in the in Digital Commons at Michigan Tech directly to the IR. So we have made this an option for students and only for those who have decided to publish their work open access. So for those of you who are unfamiliar, Creative Commons licenses are free standardized licenses that allow copyright holders to communicate how their work can and cannot be reused. And Deb had the really great idea to tie these changes and improvements together, the approval process and the addition of Creative Commons licenses together in our outreach to the university community so that we could kind of sell it as a package deal. So of course, we have been sure throughout this entire process to welcome any comments, questions and concerns about any aspect of this whole project, but tying these together kind of made it easier for us to work together and pitch this as one large initiative. And so we have been spending basically the process since spring, having discussions between myself and Annalisa and kind of trying to figure out first of all how to pitch this to the faculty if this is what we think it's a good idea and looking kind of overall at the whole process to make sure that we were thinking of it in a systems manner and again pitching it as one whole thing so that it sort of made sense as a moving forward rather than just as an individual bits and pieces kind of approach. Yeah, and we really got started with this initiative when a colleague of mine approached me and asked just if we had ever considered Creative Commons licensing for ETDRs and to my knowledge, we hadn't. So I talked to Deb and she confirmed that this really hadn't been a topic that had ever come up. So after talking about how this would benefit students, lowering barriers to licensing, enabling collaboration and increasing scholarship, it seemed like this might be a great feature for us to pursue and offer for students. But we really weren't sure what kinds of restrictions we might want to put in place and we didn't know if anyone else was offering this or how they were offering it for collections of ETDs. So one of the very first things that I did was a very simple community scan. So I sent an email out to the Digital Commons listserv and the ETD listserv and some of you might remember seeing this. I just laid out what we had in mind, what we might want to do and ask others, do you use Creative Commons licenses and how do you use them? And there was quite a bit of response of people who were also interested in learning more, but not very many substantive responses. About four people responded that they do offer Creative Commons licenses as an option for their students. So that was kind of enough for us to pursue this as a larger project. So one of the next things we did was confirm with BPress that this would be an easy piece of metadata to add to the repository, which I kind of had a hunch that it would be because it is an option in other collections. But we wanted to make sure that we would be able to offer only the six most recent 4.0 international licenses to students. And we have left out the public domain dedication and then we also needed to confirm that the approval the approval process could smoothly be moved onto the platform as well. Yeah. And so we went to our graduate faculty council then after we gather that information and that council has a representative from every graduate program as well as our graduate students. And so Annalise presented the work that she had done with the community scan of community of Creative Commons. And I presented the work that I had done in preparation for looking at the approval process and how we could manage that in Digital Commons and asked for feedback and did we think that they think this was as great idea as we thought. We got some really good feedback from the faculty, most importantly the need for education and for people to understand what these licenses were and what they meant and how they protected or allowed for more collaboration and sharing of their scholarship. And then over the summer we both did a lot of testing. We collaborated on looking at all the different aspects of it to see how it would look from a student perspective and a faculty perspective and looking at the addition of the licenses and the approval process. And it was really great to have a collaborator like Annalise who's really familiar with the digital collections to really kind of provide that outside eyes and looking at it from the library's perspective to make sure that it sort of fit together and looked good for our whole community. And then we came back to our graduate faculty council this fall and presented how we did the approval process, how we did the licensing to again get their additional feedback and make sure that we were still in line with what the faculty expected before fully launching it. Yeah, so before we did that demonstration for the graduate faculty council, I did a bit of work kind of in the background making sure that we had some workshops that were revamped, some copyright for a thesis, dissertation and report workshops. The library typically does revamped and updated to include creative commons licensing information. There is also a live guide that I've been working on to centralize the information of the graduate school had related to copyright and that the library had in other other forums, workshops, slides to create a nice one stop shop for students who just wanted information on copyright and creative commons licensing. So we were able to tell the graduate faculty council that, you know, we were prepared and we are preparing to tackle this education component for students and then one other important component to our outreach was using our daily campus newsletter Tech Today, which is published online every day to make sure that we made this announcement of these improvements multiple times to the community kind of around when we held this graduate faculty council meeting, which I think was well received. I think we've already kind of talked about a lot of these items, but really the education piece I think was was key in making this a successful initiative, moving forward, Annalise doing, you know, a lot of work with the live guide, our presentations, the support we do in the grad school for dissertation support. We do offer workshops every semester as well as on demand meetings with students in the library as well with with their copyright librarian support announcements in the newsletter. And then what we actually found out through graduate faculty council is they said, well, not all the faculty read the newsletter, so can you send them an email too? And we were trying to not clutter their inboxes, but we also sent them another email. And I've found quite a lot of success with blog posts at the graduate school level. We do a lot with screenshots that show step by step what the process looks like. And so they're very targeted to the process that they need. So faculty have one post on how to approve a dissertation in digital commons so they can see what all the different pieces and parts are and what they need to be looking for. And I think Annalise is also doing workshops as well as the on demand consultations in the library. So just lots of education, lots of different ways to outreach to students to make sure they're getting the information they need. Yeah, my colleague and I will be doing two workshops, specifically on copyright for the thesis, dissertations and reports this fall in October and November. In those workshops, we do emphasize and in all the outreach that the library does, we emphasize that we welcome on demand consultations on just about anything. So patrons are always welcome to email, chat, call, show up. And if it's a question that needs, you know, a little bit more time or a little bit more research for us, we'll schedule a consultation. But we really want to make sure that students feel comfortable approaching us, you know, before they have a looming deadline, that they don't feel like they're going to have a stupid question or that they're taking up our time. So that's one thing that we will be emphasizing in the workshop, as well as all of the resources that they can look at on their own time before and after reaching out to us, such as this lip guide, which hopefully will be a great resource for them. Because I think a lot of the copyright information was kind of tucked into the approval process that the grad school had. So kind of bringing that out and making things a little more specific to copyright and relevant to Creative Commons will hopefully satisfy that education piece. And I think we've done a good job on our campus of brainstorming all the different ways that we can approach this outreach and education. So it'll be interesting to see now that we are back in person. How this will play out this semester. And of course, we also recognize that there may be some conflict along the way in our policy in the graduate school has been that the advisor is really the last word on the access that's required for these submissions, as well as the embargo and licensing. We recognize that that gives away some author authority. They are the intellectual property holders, of course, but they often contain a lot of sensitive data. And the advisor is generally at the university. They're the manager of the data. And so it is their responsibility to ensure that the data is shared in an appropriate way and they represent the university interests. And they have some broader and deeper knowledge about how the work might be shared or used in the future in terms of publications or other sorts of considerations. And of course, the graduate school, one of my jobs is to make sure that what the student submits and what the advisor approves is then consistent across the IR, our institutional IR, as well as ProQuest. And so to make sure that all those things match up at the end. So Deb and I both exist into different units, but I think that we have done a really great job, if I don't say so myself, of working together to make this work, especially since, you know, we have been mostly remote over the summer into the fall. Checklists were really important. We had a running Google doc with all the things that we needed to do to make sure that we were both on task and didn't miss anything. And we'd write something down in April and then in August, we were like, oh, that's right, we were going to write this email or write this post. And so kind of keeping track of all those great ideas in one place so that we could make sure we implemented them when we needed to get there. And then we tied the approval process and Creative Commons into kind of one bigger initiative. We kind of balanced the load between us, with me from the library, taking on a lot of the Creative Commons and copyright expertise, Deb with the Digital Commons technical process, and then how we divided that up in our outreach while also maintaining a cohesive initiative. I think that worked pretty well. And so far, we've gotten good positive reaction from people. So we welcome any comments or questions that you have at this time. Thank you so much. I don't see any questions yet, but Lily had a comment in the chat. She writes, I had one student request it last year, so we discussed and concluded that it would be allowed. Instead of a copyright reserve, we put the Creative Commons phrase instead. That's great. Yeah, that's nice to hear that other folks are doing this. So I have about three minutes left. Any other comments or? Can definitely hang around. If you think of anything later, you are welcome to email us. Reach out. I actually have a question. So in the University of Toledo, our students, they're required to include a copyright page in their ETD. And they can be blank or contain a copyright statement. And we always just used to basically have the traditional copyright all rights reserve. And then our consortial state repository started putting other options in for Creative Commons. And so then a student would upload their document that had a traditional copyright. But then in their submission process, they would select a Creative Commons one. And so just wondered if there was a conflict like that. At Michigan TAP. We don't have them select all rights reserve. They just put the copyright statement, just the C. And I don't think that conflicts then with the Creative Commons license. Annalise, if you want to talk more about our publishing agreement. Yeah, so we have a non-exclusive license to publish that student sign for depositing on digital Commons. So it doesn't prevent students from publishing anywhere else. And that Creative Commons license will show up on the digital Commons cover page. So yeah, I don't think that would conflict if it was just a copyright of the author and then Creative Commons license on that cover page. Right, Larry writes, is C.C. an absolute substitute for copyright, or can both be used in some way? Is there even a need for both? So a Creative Commons license does not cause an author to forfeit their copyright. It is merely a refinement on how an author wishes their work to be reused. So someone who wants to reuse a work in a certain way can look at the Creative Commons license and say, does this use jive with this license or conflict? And if it's good to go, the user does not have to ask permission. They already have been given permission according to that license. We're running a little over time, but a few more comments. Valerie writes, my understanding is that Creative Commons and copyright are not mutually exclusive. Janice Robinson writes, there are varying levels of sharing that are allowed with Creative Commons. So I would only use one. So it seems to me that this is a conversation that needs to continue clearly, and might even be something for the formatting user group that many of you may belong to that's run by Sally Evans. So yeah, I would just encourage this conversation to continue. And I just want to thank both Deb and Annalise for your information and for sharing that with us. And yes, it was great information. So... It's great to be here. Thank you everyone for your comments and questions. We look forward to continuing the conversation. Great, thank you.