The CORE project will release the provided metadata and software in the following way:
– The metadata will be released under the Creatives Commons attribution license (CC BY). This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon our work, even commercially, as long as they credit CORE for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
– The software will be offered under the New BSD License or similar.
– The provided service will be offered free-of charge to everybody.
For the CORE team, it was necessary to find out if we can cache resources from Open Access repositories and store them on OU servers. However, it was concluded that this is permissible as CORE is harvesting only resources that are freely and openly available (i.e. everybody is allowed to download and use these items). CORE is processing these resources in order to provide additional services.
It was also necessary to resolve an issue regarding the release of the source code. The potential question arising with making the software Open Source is whether this will not affect the CORE sustainability as anybody could take the application and run it on their servers mitigating the Open University. However, it seems that releasing code as Open Source might rather attract third parties in being interested in the project and possibly in creating derivative work applied to solve similar problems.