The purpose of this paper is to provide brief guidelines on delivering a workshop to support the agreement and adoption of Open Access approaches, and particularly the use of Creative Commons, for licensing digital content. It is based on our experience in conducting a similar workshop, jointly organized by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) held over two days in Mumbai between March 12 and 13, 2015

Manjunath, G. K.

Pujar, Shamprasad

English

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Introduction
Organizations, researchers and practitioners conduct 
research on various developmental issues across 
geographical locations. However, much of this, 
especially research emanating from outside of Europe 
and North America, does not get wider exposure 
owing to poor indexing in online search engines/
databases, limited availability of such literature online 
in digital format and also due to copyright restrictions. 
The Open Knowledge movement seeks to address 
these issues - making research available for everyone 
through open licensing of content, and increasing 
its discoverability in digital spaces online. However 
there are some persistent misconceptions about this 
movement among organizations and researchers 
and, in many cases, a lack of resources and technical 
capacity to engage effectively. The Open Knowledge 
Hub (OKhub) project aims to help organizations 
understand the merits of Open Knowledge approaches 
and support their capacity to engage effectively by 
sharing learning, capacity and resources.
This paper discusses planning, designing and 
conducting a workshop to address the specific 
challenges around adopting open licensing 
of bibliographic data on research publications 
highlighting the methods followed at IGIDR.
Planning the event
Workshop objectives
As a first step the organizers agreed on clear and 
specific objectives for the event. The objectives set at 
IGIDR’s workshop were: 
1. To create awareness about open licensing 
or ‘Creative Commons License’ among the 
stakeholders  of Open Index Initiative (OII)  and  
to make them stakeholders also in the OKhub 
project;
2. To reach agreement on an approach to licensing 
that would ensure metadata contribution to 
the OKhub  by OII partners, for subject specific 
literature emanating from India in any document 
form, such as journal articles, working papers, 
theses and dissertations, conference papers, etc;
Selection of participants for the workshop
• Selecting participants: Participants for the 
workshop were selected based on the project 
objectives considering who could be the possible 
stakeholders or who would be likely to contribute.  
• Learning needs assessment: To design the 
workshop content, an online survey was conducted 
before the workshop using the online tool 
‘Surveymonkey’ to understand the participants’ 
views and prior knowledge about Open Access and 
open licensing. 
• Call of experts: It is advisable to identify and invite 
some Intellectual Property Right [IPR] expert(s), 
especially those specialized in open licensing with 
specific knowledge of the legal frameworks. Two 
legal experts were invited for IGIDR’s workshop 
based on their association and experience in 
designing Open Access policy for government 
departments. 
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Introduction to....
How to run an open 
licensing workshop? 
December 2015
The purpose of this paper is to provide brief guidelines on delivering a workshop to 
support the agreement and adoption of Open Access approaches, and particularly the 
use of Creative Commons, for licensing digital content. It is based on our experience in 
conducting a similar workshop, jointly organized by the Institute of Development  
Studies (IDS) and Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) held over  
two days in Mumbai between March 12 and 13, 2015.
Dr Shamprasad Pujar and Dr G. K. Manjunath
• Funds: The approximate travel and other expenses 
were estimated based on the participants 
identified and agreed upon well in advance.
Designing the workshop programme/content 
The workshop programme was set as per the 
objectives and based on the learning needs of 
participants identified from the survey.  While 
designing the content, due emphasis was also put on 
considering the methods of delivery of the programme 
and also based on the requirements of the selected 
audience. It was suggested to have both presentations 
and group discussions to encourage participants to 
actively engage in the discussions and deliberations 
of the workshop. Some thought was given to what 
additional needs they might have such as opportunities 
to network with colleagues and share information 
about their own organizations and work. All the 
participants were asked to come prepared with few 
slides to present in the workshop to showcase their 
organization’s research outputs, and to highlight 
the main challenges faced by them in making their 
research visible and usable.
Delivering the workshop
On the first day of the workshop at IGIDR the main 
focus was on introducing the Open Knowledge Hub 
(OKhub), the Open Index Initiative (OII), participants’ 
presentations, open licensing and examples of few 
Open Knowledge projects. On day two, discussions 
were focused on attribution of metadata in OII 
and OKhub, discussion on partners’ requirements, 
data contribution and technical issues of OII, data 
conversion and data standards, and MOU agreements. 
A range of participatory methods were used to 
capture and facilitate learning and collaboration 
including presentations, group discussions and 
demonstrations. This helped in participants’ active 
engagement in the proceedings of the workshop.
Workshop sessions
The sessions of the workshop included the following:
• Introduction to OKhub and OII: This gave brief 
introduction to OKhub and the services offered by 
OII in order to make participants understand more 
about these projects, so that they could visualize 
the benefits they might derive if their institute’s 
research is made available for wider audiences. 
 
• Participants’ presentations:  The main purpose of 
the presentations was to extend an opportunity 
to the participants to share information about 
their institutes’ publication activities and the main 
challenges faced by them in disseminating these 
for wider use. This helped the organizers to assess 
participant’s organization’s research work and the 
problems faced by them in making their research 
visible to the outside world. 
• Discussion on participants’ expectations: 
Discussions were initiated to assess the 
participants’ expectations from the workshop 
based on the online survey and the problems faced 
by them in making their institute’s research visible.  
For this discussion, participants were divided into 
smaller groups to have a better understanding 
about their views and opinions with regard to 
Open Access and open licensing, and how they 
would persuade their institutes to adopt it. During 
the workshop, participants of both the groups 
expressed their desire to advocate Open Access 
and open licensing for their institutes’ publications 
and also urged for IGIDR/OII to develop data 
standards for data exchange and to have a 
Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed 
by both IGIDR and their institutions for clearer 
understanding of terms and conditions for data 
sharing. 
• Open licensing of research documents and 
bibliographic information with examples:  This 
discussion was initiated to provide a brief overview 
of Open Access and open licensing including 
types of ‘Creative Commons’ licenses, benefits 
and their role in providing wider access and reuse 
of information with examples. It was suggested 
to have an IPR expert on the panel to talk on 
these aspects to have a greater clarity and its 
application in relation to local copyright law with 
some examples highlighting the open licensing 
adopted by any agencies or government in the 
region. Two legal experts who were invited for 
the talk on these topics gave a detailed account 
of Open Access to publications and data, existing 
open licensing policies, and how the authors 
and institutions could derive benefits from such 
policies. Examples of certain live projects (such as 
the OKhub) were used so that participants could 
understand the value of openness and its benefits 
and how it would help in wider use of research.
• Expectations from the project coordinator: 
Discussion was held on the role to be played 
by the participants in getting their institutions’ 
works released under open license, at least the 
bibliographic information up to abstract level.  
Participants were also briefed about how they 
could contribute data and the standards that 
might to be used for exchange of data. It was also 
suggested to seek their inputs for additional data 
fields to be added to the database to showcase 
these fields while displaying the records. 
• Agreements and discussion on MOU: A 
Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) 
strengthens the bond between organizations and 
gives an official approval to undertake a shared 
activity as per the agreed terms and conditions. 
Therefore, it was suggested that a draft MOU may 
be put before the participants and legal experts to 
seek their suggestions before it was sent to their 
respective institutes for final approval. 
Discussions were also held regarding the type of 
Creative Commons/ Open license to be adopted for 
the release of content; whether to be country specific 
or international. It was decided that the metadata 
up to the abstract level, as per India specific CCL, 
might be contributed by the participants. It was also 
suggested that it would be highly desirable to mention 
the type of CCL, India 2.5 by-NC, in the MOU.
Feedback and following up
In the concluding session it is advisable to take 
feedback from participants to measure the success of 
the workshop. As a next step, it was suggested that 
the agreed drafted MOU would be circulated among 
the participants for their institutes’ authorities to sign 
it, with or without modifications for sharing content 
under open licensing.  A regular follow up was felt 
necessary to monitor the progress and to get the 
MOUs signed for sharing the metadata.
Useful resources
IGIDR workshop report: http://www.okhub.org/
wp-content/uploads/2016/02/IGIDR-work-
shop-report.pdf 
MOU template developed at IGDIR work-
shop: http://www.okhub.org/wp-content/up-
loads/2016/02/IGIDR-IDS-MOU-template.pdf 
MindTools, Planning a Workshop: https://www.
mindtools.com/pages/article/PlanningAWork-
shop.htm 
WikiHow, How to prepare a workshop:  
http://www.wikihow.com/Prepare-a-Workshop
Creative Commons License:  
http://creativecommons.org
Open Knowledge learning paper:  
http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/
handle/123456789/7122/GOKH%20Open%20
Knowledge%20Final.pdf?sequence=1
Licensing open content learning paper:  
http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/
handle/123456789/7121/GOKH%20Licens-
ing%20Final.pdf?sequence=1 
UNESCO Open Access Curriculum for library 
schools and researchers:  
http://en.unesco.org/news/unesco-s-open-ac-
cess-oa-curriculum-now-online
IDS training slides on Understanding Open Li-
censing by Shihaam Shaikh (2013): 
• Part 1 http://www.slideshare.net/idsknowl-
edgeservices/understanding-open-licensing-
day-one-the-open-landscape 
• Part 2 http://www.slideshare.net/idsknowl-
edgeservices/understanding-open-licensing-
day-two-introducing-creative-commons 
• Part 3 http://www.slideshare.net/idsknowl-
edgeservices/understanding-open-licensing-
day-three-taking-steps-forward
Introduction to....How to run an open licensing workshop? 
IDS_Master Logo
The Global Open Knowledge Hub project aims to improve the supply and accessibility of content that supports  
evidence-informed policy making and practice in international development. It builds on emerging approaches from the 
open access and open data movements to create a new open and collaborative “hub” for sharing of development  
knowledge whilst facilitating peer support and shared learning between project partners.
To find out more go to www.okhub.org
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Institute of Development Studies, Brighton BN1 9RE UK
T +44 (0) 1273 606261
F + 44 (0) 1273 621202
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Introduction to.... How to run an open licensing workshop?

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