Whereas, The Procedures and Standing Orders of the Board of Governors (December, 2022) [1] requires that “any published materials produced under an agreement or sub-agreement using public funds must be subject to a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY),” allowing such materials to be used, modified, and monetized by any entity provided the source is properly attributed;
Whereas, California Education Code §78052 [2] establishes that “it is the intent of the Legislature that community college districts develop and implement zero-textbook-cost degrees and develop open educational resources for courses,” and $115 million dollars have been appropriated to the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office to disperse to the colleges to establish zero-textbook-cost pathways that “prioritize the development and implementation of a degree from an existing associate degree for transfer and, to the extent possible, prioritize the adaptation of existing open educational resources through existing open educational resources initiatives, or elsewhere, before creating new content”;
Whereas, The requirement to use the CC BY license as established in Procedures and Standing Orders of the Board of Governors (December, 2022) [3] can be interpreted to mean that any resource developed by curating or modifying existing openly-licensed resources must be licensed CC BY, even when a CC BY license is inconsistent with the permissions associated with the content used to develop the resource; and
Whereas, When authoring or creating new content, faculty may want to prevent the commercialization of their work and choose to use CC BY-NC since the CC BY license does not prohibit the use of openly-licensed resources from being monetized;
Resolved, That the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges request that the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office clarify that any licensing requirement established by the California Community Colleges Board of Governors applies only to content authored or created using public funds, as opposed to curated collections of resources that may not be in conflict with the licensing mandates established by the Board of Governors; and
Resolved, That the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges request that the Board of Governors modify its licensing requirement to permit the use of the CC BY-NC license (attribution-noncommercial) [4] to allow authors to prohibit the commercial use of their intellectual property.
Acclamation
1. Procedures and Standards of the Board of Governors (December, 2022): https://www.cccco.edu/-/media/CCCCO-Website/docs/procedures-standing-orders/december-2022-procedures-standing-ordersv2-a11y.pdf?la=en&hash=FF692A0AE8ACC8FE6BB2A4D75018302005A8A4D6
2. California Education Code §78052: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=78052.&lawCode=EDC
3. Procedures and Standards of the Board of Governors (December, 2022): https://www.cccco.edu/-/media/CCCCO-Website/docs/procedures-standing-orders/december-2022-procedures-standing-ordersv2-a11y.pdf?la=en&hash=FF692A0AE8ACC8FE6BB2A4D75018302005A8A4D6
4. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/