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[David M.Berry <d.berry AT sussex.ac.uk>]

Of course, and that is very good. But the default case is that the 
University owns the IP. Most academics assume that they can go off 
publishing papers, books, lecture notes and so on, often not realising 
that all these outputs are *technically* owned by the University. I 
would be interested in knowing how the US Universities handle this 
problem, as they are further down the IP route than us, but I have been 
talking to my University's IP spin-off company (yes! we have one) and 
they don't really know what they are planning to do and want maximum 
ownership in the first place so they can graciously grant permission, 
rather than the other way round... Not very conducive to a scholarly 
pursuit of knowledge... more committed to maximum revenue for the 
University...



> There are some academics (and non-academics in academic
> institutions) who are working on projects which require outputs to
> be released under a particular licence (or class of licence) as a
> condition of funding.
>
> For example all projects funded by the JISC e-learning program [1]
> are required to release the software as open source and the JISC
> funded OSS Watch [2] releases all public outputs under the free
> documentation licence.
>
> In the majority of these cases the university is aware that these
> are being released under open licences and is happy for that to happen.
>
> [1] http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_edistributed
> [2] http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/
>
> cheers
> stuart
> --
> Stuart Yeates        stuart.yeates AT computing-services.oxford.ac.uk
> OSS Watch                              http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/
> Oxford Text Archive                         http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/