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Subject: development of an education license or license option for Creative Commons

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  • From: Rachel Ellaway <rachel.ellaway AT ed.ac.uk>
  • To: cc-education AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-education] CC and Clinical Recordings used for Academic Purposes
  • Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 12:10:51 +0100

Dear All

I am currently leading a (fairly short-life) project in the UK looking at the issues surrounding the sharing and use of clinical recordings for non-clinical academic purposes (see www.cherri.mvm.ed.ac.uk). Because of the clinical nature of the recordings (such as photographs, videos, audio recordings, scans etc) there are a number of additional issues/complications to those normally encountered in sharing materials.

The key issue is the identifiability of individual patients: individuals are often identifiable in these recordings and often in a very personal or exposed way. This is bounded by both legal and ethical considerations. There are legal requirements for informed consent to be acquired before recordings are created and for what happens to personal information thereafter. This takes different forms in different jurisdictions; in Europe this is covered by variants of data protection legislation (eg http:// www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk/eventual.aspx?id=34) while in the US it is governed by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act at http://www.hipaa.org/) and so on. There are also ethical considerations that require consent rather than just assent, for instance if the patient believes that the recording is a condition of their treatment. Ownership/copyright is generally (although not unilaterally) held by the physician or the clinic/ hospital in which the recording was made rather than by the patient although the terms of consent absolutely inform how the recording can be used.

So how does this relate to Creative Commons?

Currently there are no common frameworks for being able to acquire and then subsequently share clinical recordings for academic purposes. This means that reuse and exchange is highly problematic and is often risky for all concerned. Effectively the same recordings are being made again and again locally because of the huge perceived problems associated with any alternative. An ideal solution would be to have a variation of the (elegantly simple) CC licensing model. However ...

Once granted CC licences currently appear to be in perpetuity, not limited to select groups and not limited to single jurisdictions while data protection and many other legal requirements do require limitations of this kind. To apply the CC approach to the clinical recordings problem would require (we think) a different license set, probably limited to healthcare education/training, that encapsulated the terms of consent in a common and simple framework. If possible we would like this to happen under the CC banner as the principles would still apply and a unified 'honest broker' is required to hold it together.

I would very much like to get the community's thoughts on this matter (in particular those actually working with clinical recordings in this way) and discuss how we might move this forward

with thanks (and apologies for the longish posting)

Rachel Ellaway
e-Learning Manager
MVMLTS
The University of Edinburgh





  • [cc-education] CC and Clinical Recordings used for Academic Purposes, Rachel Ellaway, 10/21/2005

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