The Teagle Foundation’s grants often result in tangible work products such as reports, white papers, books, journal articles, case studies, modules, videos, and other instructional resources. We believe that grant funded work should receive the widest possible dissemination in order to have the broadest impact possible. To that end, we require in most cases for grant work products to be made freely available to the public. We recognize there may be circumstances where a reasonable price needs to be charged in order to access grant work product due to the mode of dissemination (e.g., journal articles) or because the work product is intended to provide a source of income for future sustainability of an organization (e.g., royalties from book sales). Such circumstances will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
In general, it is the Foundation’s policy that grantees openly license the final materials created with those grants under the most recent version of the Creative Commons attribution license (CC BY). This free attribution license published by the non-profit organization Creative Commons permits others to use works made with grant funding, not only by viewing them and making copies, but also by incorporating all or parts of them into other works, changing them, and even publishing and selling them – as long as the new user attributes the work as the grantee directs. Please note that if works created with grant funding include parts or all of pre-existing works that do not belong to the grantee, those included sections must be clearly marked to indicate whether they are used under another license (and if so, which), by permission of the copyright owner, by right of fair use, or by virtue of public domain status.
Grant work products are required to be easily locatable on the web, preferably without registration or paywalls. This requires, at a minimum, that all necessary metadata be entered for all CC-licensed works and that materials are maintained as accessible to the public for at least five years.
Foundation staff will work with grantees to determine the application of the Intellectual Property Licensing Policy. Exceptions will be made to this policy if such exceptions will increase the likelihood that the grant purpose will be achieved or will enhance the project’s impact. If the CC BY license does not make sense for a particular product—for instance, if revenue generated by its sale is critical to a grantee organization’s financial well-being—we will work with the grantee to determine the most appropriate license. We expect the need for such exceptions to be rare, but our commitment to open licensing is meant to help, not harm, grantees, and we will administer it accordingly.
Please direct questions about this policy to Loni Bordoloi Pazich at bordoloi@teagle.org.