UK copyright specialists create copyright board game

Wednesday, 20 June 2018 Books+Publishing

In the UK, two copyright specialists have created a board game to help research students and early-career researchers understand copying and licensing choices, reports the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.

Created by Jane Secker and Chris Morrison and pitched as the ‘academic Game of Life’, The Publishing Trap board game aims to promote copyright literacy across the library and cultural sector in the UK.

The game was launched in October 2017 and has been made available to download on Secker and Morrison’s UK Copyright Literacy website. The game is licensed under Creative Commons for free download but the pair also plan to have a professionally produced game available to purchase.

Morrison said he conceived the idea in 2015 to ‘create a model that might explain how knowledge and money flowed between research institutions, publishers and academics, and the impact this had on the wider world’. The game follows the life cycle of four academics—an astrophysicist, a Jane Austen scholar, a criminologist and a microbiologist—from PhD submission to professorship.

Secker and Morrison presented a prototype of The Publishing Trap at the World Library and Information Congress (IFLA) in Poland in August 2017, and were also invited to several conferences to showcase the game, including the Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC) in Liverpool, in April this year, and the recent German Library Congress in Berlin.

The pair also said ‘several’ Australian universities, as well as Creative Commons New Zealand, are looking to adapt the game to use as part of open access training, and a group of German librarians has asked to translate the game.

Category: Library news International