Who owns educational products developed with federal funds? Intellectual property rights in preK-12 education

ABSTRACT

Although law and regulation governing the distribution of intellectual property rights has significant implications for the cost, quality, and adaptability of educational products and services, PreK-12 education researchers have largely overlooked this issue. Recent changes to federal regulations in the U.S. require some federally funded educational products to be ‘open license,’ allowing the public to freely use curricula, tests, and other deliverables created using U.S. Department of Education (ED) competitive grant funds. The new regulations represent a significant departure from earlier ‘closed license’ regulations that permitted ED grant recipients to restrict others’ use of their copyrightable grant deliverables. Focusing on these new regulations, this manuscript introduces education scholars to law regarding who owns products created with federal funds and summarizes opinions about the proposed ED rule change’s implications for the cost, quality, and adaptability of educational products. We then examine existing evidence regarding open and closed licensing, noting the lack of study of educational products. To fill this gap, we emphasize the importance of moving beyond the past focus on entirely open and entirely closed licensing policies, using the example of educational assessments to highlight pressing unanswered questions and suggest how educational researchers might construct a research agenda moving forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics
• open science
• educational products
• qualitative

Acknowledgment

The co-authors acknowledge their equal contributions to this manuscript, are grateful for support from the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs’ Copyright Policy Initiative, and thank Linda Smith-Brecheisen, Caroline Eisner, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary data

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel A. Gordon

Rachel A. Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Senior Scholar at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs (IGPA) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received a B.S. in psychology from Penn State and a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Chicago. Dr. Gordon's research broadly aims to measure and model the contexts of the lives of children and families, often using longitudinal data sets. She has examined numerous contextual and social factors that affect children and families, including the use of child care and preschool quality measures for high-stakes policy purposes, the health outcomes of child care and maternal employment, the implications of teenagers' looks for their social and academic achievement, the association between community context and child well-being, the relationships between youth gang participation and delinquency, the causes and consequences of grandmother co-residential support for young mothers, and the evaluation of an innovative job program for young couples. Since 2008, she has been the principal investigator of research on child care services and child development funded by the USDA Economic Research Service, the Institute of Education Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation. She also directed the IGPA Early Investments and Copyright Policy Initiatives and is Chair of the IGPA System-wide Education and Learning Working Group.

Benjamin M. Superfine

Benjamin M. Superfine is a Professor and the Chair of the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he also serves as a Faculty Affiliate in the Learning Sciences Research Institute and the Center for Urban Educational Leadership. Superfine received his J.D. and Ph.D. in Education Foundations and Policy from the University of Michigan. Before joining UIC, Superfine practiced law at Dow Lohnes PLLC in Washington, D.C. His research focuses on the history of education law and policy, school finance reform, standards-based reform and accountability, teacher evaluation, and teacher unions. His research is interdisciplinary and address educational issues through the lenses of law, history, and social science.