The Pros and Cons of Open Licensing: How to Bring Them Together Effectively to Serve Funders and Local Publishers

• In Event: Best practices and innovations in children’s storybook publishing: public-private partnerships, quality translations, open licensing, and pooled procurement

Proposal

Increasingly, both government and private donors are requiring that storybooks created with their funding be openly licensed and available on an online platform. The reasoning for this is sound: without traditional copyright protections, funded materials can be leveraged across many different projects rather than disappearing after the intervention has concluded. Content creators of all kinds want the visibility and discoverability of an online presence. However, the goal of many storybook development projects increasingly hopes to support the publishing business, and traditional publishing models rely almost entirely on the sales of copyright work which cannot legally be copied, and of subsidiary rights (such as e-book, translation, audio, audiovisual, and merchandising licenses). Leading open-licensing researchers Neil Butcher & Associates state in their Primer on open licensing for African publishers (Butcher, Von Gogh & Levey, 2018), “Emergence of revenue-generating publishing models that harness open licensing is in an embryonic phase. There is no clarity yet as to which will be successful specific business models and which will not. As in other content creation industries, there is likely to be extensive experimentation, with many failures, before sustainable business models are found.”

Under an applied research framework, this session will explore the use of open licensing in the context of Room to Read’s South Africa REACH project. The project asked 5 small publishers to develop 4 storybooks in one indigenous language, and then to openly license the book for translation across four other languages. The project also utilized the book creation hackathon model developed by Book Dash (www.bookdash.org), which asks volunteer writers, illustrators, designers, and editors to license their creative contributions under an open license. The interaction between the project’s many publishers, many creators, and the open licensing required by the grant resulted in a variety of learnings about Creative Commons licenses and how they can be applied in practice—especially with publishers who may hold tightly to traditional views on licensing and business models.

Session attendees will review the basics of open licensing in theory, and a thorough understanding of how they work in practice among the various constituents in a publishing project. We will share how and why we made certain decisions around licensing, and offer recommendations for other members of the development community working on similarly challenging publishing projects.

Author

• Alison Ziki, Room to Read