We believe that the principle of academic integrity is essential for any research or creative work in the learning process. Academic integrity is the foremost of our responsibilities toward the world of knowledge, to the society in which we live, to each other, and to ourselves. It is therefore our aim to not violate any of the principles of academic integrity at any stage of our work. We hold ourselves responsible for maintaining an ethical approach and strictly adhere to the academic integrity principles for our academic research and productivity. Hence, as stated under the Academic Integrity Statement of Sabancı University,
"When students and educational staff are preparing materials, all types of information and information sources are used in accordance with intellectual property and commercial rights and the copyright holder is respected. Sources are not reproduced, copied, altered to another format or rented, nor are others allowed to carry out such acts."
For this reason, copyright issues were one of the most important areas we needed to work on. In one of our first meetings, the team of writers from the previous book project joined us to share their experiences while writing the current series of School of Languages books, Beyond the Boundaries (http://sl.sabanciuniv.edu/projects/beyond-the-boundaries). Copyright was one of the issues that they also touched on. They acknowledged the fact that asking for and receiving copyright permission required a lot of time and effort. For this reason, we were advised to take action as soon as we started finding texts that were suitable for our needs. To ensure that there was no copyright infringement, we have drawn up a plan:
1. Prepare a copyright request letter template: It is of crucial importance that the copyright letter has all the necessary information and makes clear how the text will be exploited. We used a template letter that was approved by our consultant lawyer. The letter has the following information:
- brief information about our university,
- purpose of the project,
- clear information about the article: title, date, author, website and so on,
- how the text will be used: will it be edited in any way, and if so, why and how,
- number of books that will be published, with information on any possibility of any re-runs,
- who to contact for response: it is very important to keep a record of all e-mail exchanges and any contracts and contracts and documents that have been agreed by both parties.
2. Send the requests as soon as possible: Some copyright owners have responded within one working day, whereas we needed to send reminder letters to some owners who didn't respond in a few weeks. Even when the owners repond, the process can take a while to agree on any possible fee. If the owner allows editing the text, they usually ask for the finalized copy before they agree to allow using the text. For this reason, expect at least a month before a text can be finalized for use.
3. Have a contingency plan: It may not always be possible to find a contact for a text, or you may not get a positive response. Because the process takes time, it is advisable that you have alternative texts that you can replace these articles. We found that such texts were also helpful when the cost for an article exceeded our budget.
4. Keep a record: It is important to save copies of any e-mail exhanges, and purchase agreement forms need to be saved. If there is a lawyer at your institution, you may be required to share and get the agreement forms approved.
5. Understand the details in terms of use: Some owners may allow minor editing of their text when it is for educational purposes. For example, they may allow changing words with their synonyms, or add markers of coherence to make the text more accessible for students. However, such details need to be checked with the owner. If they allow any editing, they usually ask for the edited version before printing for a final approval before allowing copyrights. Therefore, open communication is crucial. Moreover, if the text you would like to use contains images, most of the time the copyright of the text does not include the copyrights of the images or charts used. If you intend to use these as well, this may require contacting the copyright owners of these images separately, which may add to the costs as well as take time. Another point to be careful about is the publishing and expiry date. Some contracts will require your book to be published within a specific time period, and only for a limited number of years (usually 3 or 5 years).
Sources we have found useful for our purposes
As School of Languages, our purpose was to expose students to authentic reading resources. We did not intend to make any changes to language, content, or organization, since students will be exposed to texts of various kinds of genres in their future studies. For this reason, our text search and text selection focused on texts that would be appropriate for our level in terms of text length and text difficulty. Once these details and the themes were specified, we started looking for texts that were written in an academic style, were rich in content, and fit our specifications in terms of text size and difficulty.
For our purposes, newspapers provided useful texts. However, their copyright requirements can be overwhelming for small-scale projects, as it was in our case. International newspapers have very detailed licence agreement forms that have to be filled in before payment, and they usually require a lawyer to consult on certain details. In our case, most of the newspapers also had an expiry date for the agreement. Depending on how long the book is projected to be used, the need to renew the contract after a certain amount of time can be a source of concern, especially in terms of the budget allocated.
However, most of the researchers and lecturers who wrote in their own blogs have responded to our copyright requests positively. Also, international organizations such as UNESCO provide reports that they may be willing to allow copyright free of charge, especially if it is for educational purposes. There are many organizations that do not require explicit permission for specific purposes. One such example is NASA, which provides guidelines on their website: https://www.nasa.gov/
However, it is important to note here that even when we found such statements of copyrights, we still contacted the organizations just to make sure that we did not mistinterpret and violate any permission rights.
For visuals, we have discovered that some websites provide images free of charge.
Many of the images on some websites that you can see below are free from copyright restrictions, or they are licensed under creative commons public domain dedication. This allows you to copy, modify, re-distribute the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission, though for some photos may be required to attribute. If you decide to use any such website that provides images free of charge, we advise you that you approach all websites and images with utmost attention to understand the terms by which the images can be used.
Here you can find some of the websites that enabled us to find some effective images relevant to our themes:
The images that you can see on the home page of this website are also from one of the sources listed above.
Below we would like to share the template we have been using, developed and finalized with advice and approval from our lawyer. Please feel free to edit it for your own institution to ask for copyrights, but we advise that you ask your laywer/consultant to go over the letter and suggest changes that they see important. Please note that the below letter is intended for reading texts, and to get copyrights for listening texts, you may need to make changes. For instance, you would need to state it very clearly if you would like to turn an article into a lecture or an interview, and inform the copyright holder of all the changes you may/will need to make. In our experience, we have decided to write our own scripts and not use external texts as a basis. This is because we would like to introduce a variety of speech genres, with a wide range of organizational patterns. Also, we would like our learners to be exposed to as many target words from our lists as possible. That would mean changing a text to a very large extent to fit our purposes, and our experience has shown us that it is not very possible to get the copyrights when such major changes to the structure and language are intended. As a result, we have been writing our own scripts from scratch.
