As the original or primary author of contributed materials, you have control over how the material will be released. Basically, you can specify material as "Private Release" and restrict it to specific groups. Or you can specify it as "Public Release" to allow anyone to access it. Only materials tagged by their authors as "Public Release" will be included in hardbound versions of published workbooks and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license.
In the spirit of Open Access, we would like to make as many materials as possible available to the public, but we understand if some authors may want to restrict access until the material is published more formally. The following list outlines the anticipated flow of submitted materials.
- An author submits material and tags it as either "For Internal Release" or "For Public Release" and assigns it to a specific group.
- "Internal Release" material would only be available to members and would be restricted to, for example, groups of instructors, PhD students, students of a certain class, etc. The author maintains control of how the materials are used, publishing it only to approved groups, possibly creating a special new group. The author may post initially to only the "Contributors" or "Reviewers" group so that only other authors or reviewers can view it.
- Authors might want to keep lectures or presentations private until they have been formally published in printed form. Solution sets will likely be kept private forever and made available only to confirmed instructors.
- "Public Release" material would immediately, or eventually, be made available by the author to anyone who visits the site and could be freely used by members of the site to create new custom course books and curricula.
- Generally, we anticipate that bibliographies, tutorials, links to other websites, most problem sets, and some data and software could be made available to the public right away
- Materials will be made available to the public when this status is approved by the original author and when its quality has been assured by several reviewers.
- Once released to the public, the material will formally be licensed using the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license, and any future revisions to the material will remain open to the public under this license.
- IMPORTANT: Once a set of material is published in a hardcopy workbook, it will then be opened to the public on the website and released under the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license, if it hasn't already. Having material published and distributed as a book highlights the fact that it is copyrighted material and must always be attributed to its listed author(s)
- IMPORTANT: Authors will always be able to choose whether or not they want their material included in published workbooks or coursebooks and openly published on the website. They can also choose to publish their work anywhere else they want. But once it has been published openly, it will be made available to the public according to the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license.
